China’s Linkerbot targets $6 billion valuation after $3 billion Series B+ funding

China’s Linkerbot, the global market leader in highly dexterous robotic hands for humanoids, plans to target a $6 billion valuation in its next financing round—double the $3 billion mark set in a just-closed raise, the company said. The Beijing-based startup said it completed a “Series B+” round last week that valued the company at $3 billion.

Linkerbot did not disclose when it will launch the next raise or whether the $6 billion target would be pursued through a private investment round or an initial public offering. Prominent early backers include Alibaba’s Ant Group and HongShan Group, the Sequoia spin-off.

The latest round drew the state-backed Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management and Fosun Capital, according to a company statement on Thursday. CEO Alex Zhou said Linkerbot now holds over 80% of the global market for high-degree-of-freedom robotic hands and plans to scale monthly production “soon” to 10,000 units from nearly 5,000.

Investor interest in China’s humanoid robotics sector has surged this year after market leaders such as Unitree showcased rapid technical progress during a widely watched TV performance and the Beijing humanoid robot half-marathon last month. Unitree filed for a Shanghai IPO in March, seeking a valuation of up to $7 billion.

Unlike rivals such as X Square Robot that train hands for household chores, Linkerbot focuses on high-value human craftsmanship. “We aren’t just making hands. Our goal is to replicate the entire library of human dexterous skills within our hardware,” Zhou said, highlighting the firm’s LinkerSkillNet platform, which he claims is the world’s largest real-world dexterous manipulation dataset.

The multimodal system converts human skills into standardized, reusable capabilities for robotic hands and currently contains more than 500 skills. “The hand is the most complex part of the whole humanoid robot,” said Georg Stieler, head of robotics and automation at technology consultancy Stieler, noting that Elon Musk has repeatedly said the component consumes more than half of the engineering effort for Tesla’s Optimus.

Musk has promised the latest Optimus, due this spring, will have “the manual dexterity of a human.” Zhou, inspired by Doraemon, the Japanese cartoon robot cat, envisions Linkerbot’s hands playing the piano, giving massages or even performing dentistry—skills he argues deliver “value-add that is at least triple that of basic labour.” The company says its hands can already rapidly turn screws, grasp deformable soft objects, thread a needle and execute high-precision manufacturing tasks.

Linkerbot supplies some of China’s leading humanoid robot makers as well as foreign industrial giants, though it declined to name them, citing non-disclosure agreements. Its basic O6 light-weight model weighs just 370 grams but can carry a 50-kilogram load, a combination Zhou said is crucial for industrial applications where miniaturization and strength are required.

The company manufactures core components such as joint modules, motors and reducers in-house, and uses specialized polymers that are self-lubricating and corrosion-resistant, according to Zhou. Beyond factories, its hands are used by research institutes and leading global universities.

Linkerbot now has more than 400 employees and five factories in Beijing and Shenzhen, and is developing intelligent production lines where robotic hands assemble other hands. A key hurdle to broader deployment of humanoids on factory floors is cost, which analysts estimate at $100,000 to $150,000 per unit for leading industrial models from Unitree, AgiBot and UBTech.

Linkerbot did not say when its next fundraising will begin or what form it would take.