Linkerbot, a Beijing-based robotics startup specializing in dexterous robotic hands for humanoid platforms, is targeting a $6 billion valuation in its next financing round – double the $3 billion valuation established in a Series B+ round closed last week. The two-year-old company currently claims over 80% of the global market for high-degree-of-freedom robotic hands and is producing approximately 5,000 units per month, with plans to scale to 10,000 monthly units soon.

The latest funding round drew participation from state-backed Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management, and Fosun Capital, alongside existing backers Alibaba’s Ant Group and Sequoia spin-off HongShan Group. The company has not disclosed when the next round will launch or whether the $6 billion target is being pursued through private investment or an IPO.

Why Hands Are the Hard Problem

The robotic hand is widely regarded as the most mechanically and computationally demanding component in a humanoid robot. “The hand is the most complex part of the whole humanoid robot,” said Georg Stieler, head of robotics and automation at technology consultancy Stieler. “Elon Musk described on several occasions that the part was taking more than half of their whole engineering effort for Tesla’s Optimus.”

Linkerbot’s hands can thread a needle, turn screws rapidly, grasp deformable soft objects, and perform high-precision manufacturing tasks. Its O6 lightweight model can carry a 50-kilogram load despite weighing only 370 grams – a strength-to-weight ratio the company describes as a key advantage for industrial applications where miniaturization matters. Key components including joint modules, motors, and reducers are manufactured in-house, using specialized self-lubricating and corrosion-resistant polymers.

The LinkerSkillNet Platform

Beyond hardware, Linkerbot has built LinkerSkillNet, a multimodal data collection platform that converts human dexterous skills into standardized, reusable robotic capabilities. The platform currently contains over 500 skills and functions as what the company claims is the world’s largest real-world dexterous manipulation dataset – a training resource that gives its hands a software advantage alongside the mechanical one.

“We aren’t just making hands. Our goal is to replicate the entire library of human dexterous skills within our hardware,” said CEO Alex Zhou.

A More Pragmatic Deployment Path

Linkerbot is also addressing the cost barrier that has slowed humanoid adoption in factories. Leading industrial humanoid platforms from Unitree, Agibot, and UBTECH currently cost between $100,000 and $150,000 per unit. Linkerbot’s hands can be mounted directly onto existing robotic arms, allowing manufacturers to add dexterous manipulation capability to infrastructure they already own rather than purchasing a complete humanoid system.

“Chinese factory owners are extremely pragmatic. They’ve realised that for most factory work, two arms and a pair of dexterous hands are enough,” said Zhou. “Currently, many of our customers simply mount our hands onto existing robotic arms rather than buying a full humanoid.”

The company supplies leading Chinese humanoid manufacturers as well as foreign industrial clients operating under nondisclosure agreements. It has over 400 employees and five factories across Beijing and Shenzhen, and is developing intelligent production lines where robotic hands are used to manufacture other robotic hands.

Investor interest in the Chinese humanoid supply chain has accelerated significantly following Unitree’s widely viewed Spring Festival performance and the Beijing half-marathon in April. Unitree filed for a Shanghai IPO in March targeting a valuation of up to $7 billion, and Linkerbot’s trajectory suggests the supply chain layer is attracting comparable capital at comparable speed.

Meta has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, known as ARI, a startup building foundation models for humanoid robots to perform physical labor in complex, human-occupied environments. The financial terms were not disclosed. ARI’s founding team, including co-founders Xiaolong Wang and Lerrel Pinto, will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs research division.

“We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments,” a Meta spokesperson said.

Who ARI’s Founders Are

The acquisition is notable for the caliber of the researchers involved. Xiaolong Wang was previously a researcher at Nvidia and an associate professor at UC San Diego, with a research background in robot learning and computer vision. Lerrel Pinto previously taught at NYU and co-founded Fauna Robotics, a kid-size humanoid startup acquired by Amazon last month. Both co-founders carry significant academic and industry credentials in the robotics AI research community.

ARI was building foundation models intended to enable humanoid robots to perform a broad range of physical tasks, including household chores – a use case that requires robots to operate reliably in unstructured environments with variable object configurations and human presence.

Meta’s Humanoid Ambitions

Meta researchers have been working on humanoid robotics technology for several years. A leaked internal memo in early 2025 outlined ambitions to develop both AI models and hardware for a consumer humanoid robot. The ARI acquisition accelerates the AI model side of that program, adding a team with specific expertise in whole-body humanoid control and self-learning systems.

“This team will bring deep expertise in how we can design our models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control,” the Meta spokesperson said.

The acquisition also reflects a broader thesis gaining traction in the AI research community: that the path toward artificial general intelligence may require training AI models through direct physical interaction with the real world, rather than on data alone. Robots that learn by doing – adapting through experience in dynamic environments – generate a class of training signal that text and image datasets cannot replicate.

Industry Context

The ARI deal follows Amazon’s acquisition of Fauna Robotics last month and is part of an accelerating pattern of large technology companies acquiring robotics AI research teams rather than building the capability internally from scratch. Meta, Amazon, Google, and Apple have all made moves in physical AI over the past year, reflecting a shared view that embodied intelligence is becoming a foundational capability rather than a peripheral research area.

Market size projections for the humanoid robot sector vary significantly – Goldman Sachs estimates a $38 billion market by 2035, while Morgan Stanley projects $5 trillion by 2050 – a spread that reflects both the sector’s long-term potential and the substantial uncertainty that remains around commercialization timelines and deployment scale.