It’s all in the hands
This month had a tight cluster of dexterity moves showing the hand stack moving on several fronts at once: production scale, new hardware, model-layer control and data collection around contact-rich manipulation.
Linkerbot
Linkerbot closed a Series B+ at a $3 billion valuation and is targeting $6 billion in its next round, according to Reuters. The Beijing company claims more than 80% of the global market for high-degree-of-freedom robotic hands and is producing approximately 5,000 units per month, with plans to double that capacity to 10,000.
Its LinkerSkillNet platform converts human skills into reusable robotic capabilities and currently contains more than 500 recorded skills. Customer names are withheld under NDAs; the company says it supplies leading Chinese humanoid makers and foreign industrial companies. CEO Alex Zhou, who founded Linkerbot in 2023, said his goal is to replicate the entire library of human dexterous skills in hardware.
Early backers include Ant Group and HongShan; the Series B+ added the Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management, and Fosun Capital.
Xynova
Xynova launched Flex 2 on May 13 and plans to show it offline at ICRA 2026 on June 2. The Hangzhou company, founded in late 2024, develops and manufactures motors, motor controllers, reducers, ball screws, and control algorithms for dexterous hands in-house. Its angel round of over $13.7 million was led by CATL Capital and Xiaomi Strategic Investment. Flex 2 is a 23-degree-of-freedom hybrid-drive hand weighing approximately 400 grams. Xynova is building a production facility targeting annual capacity of more than 10,000 high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hands and 200,000 miniature electric cylinders by end of 2026, with orders secured from leading humanoid robot manufacturers.
RLWRLD
RLWRLD released RLDX-1 on May 7, a dexterity-first vision-language-action model for robot hands. Korthos covered the release in detail earlier this month. The architecturally relevant point here is that RLDX-1 treats physical feedback as part of the model input, not just as a downstream control problem. RLWRLD says its Multi-Stream Action Transformer gives modalities including vision-language, proprioception, action, memory, tactile and torque their own streams, with cross-modal attention used to connect them. The company’s stated position is that standard VLA models trained mainly around vision and language struggle with contact-heavy tasks where force, torque and tactile signals carry much of the operationally useful information.
Hardware in the demo comes from fellow Korean company WIRobotics and their ALLEX platform.
Genesis AI
Genesis AI unveiled GENE-26.5 on May 6 alongside a proprietary dexterous hand and a data collection system. The Paris and San Carlos-based company's hand pairs with a glove equipped with tactile-sensing electronic skin, creating a 1:1:1 mapping between the human hand, the glove, and the robotic hand. Genesis says the glove costs 100 times less than typical teleoperation hardware and achieved up to five times greater data collection efficiency in internal testing.
GENE-26.5 is a foundation model for robotics designed for long-horizon manipulation tasks; Genesis demonstrated cooking a 20-step meal, solving a Rubik's Cube, lab pipetting, wire harnessing, and multi-object grasping.
The company raised $105 million in seed funding from Eclipse, Khosla Ventures, Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Daniela Rus, and Vladlen Koltun. It is in late-stage discussions with customers in France, Germany, and Italy across automotive, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and logistics.
Wuji Tech said it helped manufacture Genesis Hand 1.0, based on Genesis’s 1:1 human proportions and back-drivable design principles.
Wuji Tech
Wuji Tech showed Wuji Hand 2 on May 11. The second-generation hand retains 20 degrees of freedom and fully direct-drive biomimetic actuation, with upgrades to heat dissipation and overall form factor. Wuji describes it as a full upgrade eight months after the original hand launched. The original Wuji Hand weighs under 600 grams, delivers approximately 15 Newtons of fingertip force, and is rated for more than 300,000 grasp cycles.
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