Two years after a Beijing engineer started building dexterous hands inspired by a Japanese cartoon, his company holds 80% of the global market and is doubling its valuation in months.

Robotic hands are not, conventionally, the part of a humanoid robot that investors get excited about. The legs walk, the arms lift, and the head, increasingly, talks. The hands have always been the difficult part, fiddly bits of engineering with too many moving pieces and not enough commercial pull. For most of the past decade, capable, dexterous hands have been research projects, not businesses.

Linkerbot, a Beijing-based startup founded in 2023, is testing whether that has changed.

According to a Reuters report on 4 May, the two-year-old company is preparing to raise its next funding round at a $6bn valuation, double the $3bn it secured in a Series B+ closed only days earlier.

Reuters describes Linkerbot as the global market leader in high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hands, with more than 80 per cent share by volume and the only operation in the world capable of shipping above 1,000 units a month. Production, the company told Reuters, is on track to scale from roughly 5,000 units monthly to 10,000.

That is a striking pace for a category that, on most observers’ priors, was not a market until very recently.

From Doraemon to dexterity

Linkerbot’s chief executive, Alex Zhou Yong, told the South China Morning Post that the idea began in childhood with Doraemon, the Japanese cartoon cat whose magical pocket produces an inexhaustible supply of gadgets. Zhou, who studied robotics, eventually concluded that the trick was not the pocket but the hands. A robot that can manipulate objects with anything close to human dexterity does not need an infinite toolkit; it can use ours.

The company’s flagship Linker Hand series spans six to 42 degrees of freedom, the engineering measure of independent movement axes, and uses, according to Reuters, all the major actuation methods used in the field. The lightweight O6 model weighs 370g and is rated to handle a 50kg load. Higher-DoF variants, such as the L30, are aimed at research labs and humanoid integrators willing to pay for finer-grained control.

In demonstrations, the hands turn screws at speed, grasp soft objects without crushing them, thread a needle, and carry out high-precision assembly tasks. None of these is a particularly novel feat for a research prototype, earlier robot hands have managed similar tricks, and Linkerbot is far from the only firm chasing the problem; Swiss startup mimic is using generative AI to teach a humanoid hand by watching humans work. The point, in Linkerbot’s pitch, is that the demos are now happening on a production line.

Early backers include Ant Group, the financial-services arm of Alibaba, and HongShan Group, the Chinese spin-out of Sequoia Capital. The latest round added the state-backed Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management, and Fosun Capital. The mix, private internet capital alongside state vehicles and a major bank, is a fair summary of where Chinese deeptech funding is concentrated in 2026.
It also reflects a wider pattern.

It also reflects a wider pattern. Investor interest in Chinese humanoid robotics has surged this year, helped along by viral demonstrations including the Beijing humanoid robot half-marathon in April, where a Tien Kung Ultra unit beat the human world record by seven minutes, and a televised performance featuring Unitree’s machines.

Unitree itself filed for a Shanghai listing in March at a target valuation of around $7bn, having last raised privately at roughly $3bn. Other Chinese players, including Galbot, AgiBot, and AI2 Robotics, are clustered in the $2bn-$3bn range.

The intensity of the talent race in Chinese robotics has reached the point where rival UBTech has dangled an $18m package for a chief AI scientist. By that yardstick, a $6bn valuation for a company that makes only the hands is an aggressive bet.

It is also a bet that goes against a striking gap in the market. Figure AI, the leading US humanoid startup, raised at a $39bn valuation in September 2025, despite shipping a fraction of the volume its Chinese counterparts manage. The disparity reflects, in part, what each side is being priced as.

American investors treat humanoid companies as artificial-intelligence platforms; Chinese investors price them more cautiously, as industrial hardware businesses. Linkerbot, which sells the hands rather than the whole robot, sits awkwardly between those framings.

Hands that build hands

The company’s expansion is more concrete than most pitches at this stage of the AI cycle. Reuters reports more than 400 employees and five factories across Beijing and Shenzhen. The most quietly ambitious detail, mentioned almost in passing, is that some of those factories are being designed as intelligent production lines on which Linkerbot’s robotic hands assemble more robotic hands.

If that pans out, it would be one of the first commercial demonstrations of dexterous manipulation moving from research into closed-loop manufacturing, akin to the Siemens-Nvidia factory deployment in Erlangen but turned inward, and a useful internal proof point for would-be customers.

Linkerbot also says it has built what it calls LinkerSkillNet, described as the largest real-world dataset of dexterous manipulation skills in operation, with more than 500 captured behaviours. The figure has not been independently audited, but the broader claim, that the company is accumulating proprietary training data of the kind that will shape next-generation manipulation models, is consistent with how rivals describe the strategic prize.

Whether $6bn is too much for a hand maker, however dexterous, will depend on which market thesis turns out to be correct. If humanoid robots remain industrial niche products, Linkerbot’s component-supplier role caps its upside, however large its market share.

If, on the other hand, the field follows the trajectory China’s investors increasingly assume, with humanoids moving into logistics, services, and eventually domestic environments, as 1X is already attempting with its NEO home robots, hand suppliers with deep manufacturing capability and proprietary data could capture a disproportionate share of the value chain.

There are also softer risks: the geopolitical exposure that comes with state-fund investors and a Beijing-Shenzhen footprint at a moment of renewed US scrutiny of Chinese deeptech, and the possibility that humanoid platforms eventually integrate hand designs in-house.

Tesla, which is preparing Shanghai Gigafactory for Optimus mass production, has signalled it intends exactly that, and Meta’s acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence hints that platform players want the whole robot, not a third-party bill of materials. Linkerbot’s bet is that being early, large, and the only volume supplier in its category will be enough to outrun those risks.

Investors will price that bet in the next round. For now, a company that started with a cartoon cat and a hunch about hands is one of the more closely watched stories in the global robotics market, and one of the few in which the headline numbers, market share, monthly volume, and employee count are not just promises.

For fifty-one weeks out of the year, I’m 100 percent not the CEO of Snap, the company behind Snapchat. That’s Evan Spiegel, the company’s billionaire cofounder. No one in their right mind would question that. But for one week out of the year, specifically last week, some people may have thought I was the social media firm’s top executive. If you looked on Wikipedia, it sure seemed like I was.

Starting on Sunday, when you clicked on Spiegel’s Wikipedia page, there was a picture of me. The same thing happened if you ran a Google Search for Evan Spiegel or asked Google Gemini about him. At the time of publication, that’s still the case.

How did this happen? Despite what the internet might have you believe, I’m Maxwell Zeff (friends call me Max). The photo on Spiegel’s Wikipedia page was taken at a TechCrunch conference last year. I’m a reporter in my twenties, and while I write about technology companies for a living, I’ve never met Spiegel and have barely ever written about Snapchat.

But now I’m the CEO—according to Wikipedia. This first came to my attention on Monday, when I was scrolling through social media and I saw a random account post “that doesn’t look like Evan Spiegel” with a screenshot of my photo on his Wikipedia page. I paused for a second, wondering if I was seeing things. I reposted the photo on Twitter and said, “Very flattering but that is indeed me, and not the CEO of Snap.” My followers were amused, responding with comments such as “Congrats on the promotion” and “when yacht invitation max.”

The next day, I was still Wikipedia Evan Spiegel. A Snap employee texted a mutual friend a screenshot of a Google search for Spiegel, saying, “Not Max being the second photo that comes up on Google now …” A day later, more colleagues, friends, and family members had started to notice. One texted me, “Why are you Evan Spiegel?” I didn’t have a good answer. Before I knew it, I had spent a whole week as Wikipedia Evan Spiegel. I decided to do some sleuthing.

On April 26, someone with the username “Artem G” changed the photo of Evan Spiegel to one of me with the comment “Newer photo,” according to the page’s revision history. Then, a few days later, someone changed it back, correctly stating: “That’s Maxwell Zeff, not Evan Spiegel.” Within hours, Artem G hopped back on and reverted the change, returning my face to the Wikipedia page saying, “Nah, new photo is better, take it to the talk page if you must.”

Artem G’s attitude and dedication piqued my interest. For the uninitiated, the talk page is where Wikipedia editors go to settle disputes. Who was this person who felt adamantly that I should be Wikipedia Evan Spiegel and was willing to throw down in the talk page to keep me there?

I scrolled a bit further down and found that Artem G had actually tried to make me Wikipedia Evan Spiegel another time, back in February, but the photo had stayed up for only a few hours. I clicked on Artem G’s contributions page to see what other Wikipedia pages he had made changes to. There were lots. He’d made hundreds of contributions to various pages—ranging from Swiss scientists to space artifacts to Claude—just in the past month.

Plenty of people scroll past cheap desk gadgets online without a second thought. One particular alarm clock shaped like the original 1984 Macintosh caught the eye of builder Wells Riley. Sold on AliExpress for around twenty dollars, the Maclock looks shockingly close to the real thing from the outside, complete with the distinctive beige case, floppy disk slot detail, and even a small screen area. Inside, though, it held nothing more than basic clock circuitry and a speaker for alarms.

First, he decided to strip out the components and replace them with parts capable of running genuine Classic Mac OS software, resulting in a tiny little gadget that yet provides a rather accurate retro computer experience. Every original button still works, the brightness knob really adjusts the display, the speaker plays the startup bells and system noises, and the entire thing can be powered by a battery. Of course, no external monitor or keyboard is required to get started, but if you do want to connect to something, use the USB ports.

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Core hardware choices made the tight fit possible. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W provides the processing power in a board small enough to hide inside the four-inch-tall case. A Waveshare 2.8-inch IPS LCD replaces the original clock face and delivers crisp pixels at a resolution suitable for the era’s software. To make the screen sit flush behind the curved plastic lens, Riley designed and 3D-printed a custom bezel that adapts the display perfectly to the Maclock’s contours. Without that printed part, the modern panel would sit too deep or sit crooked.

Wiring it all together required additional equipment. Riley created an open-source breakout board called the Macintosh Mini PCB. It may be obtained from sites such as PCBWay, and there is even a shared URL in the project files that anyone can use if they so desire. The board manages the connections for the buttons, the brightness dial, audio output via a small amp, and power. It also has an area where you may bend or remove specific pins on the Pi so that they do not interfere with the screen. The guidelines also provide a basic wiring table that shows you which pins on the breakout board connect to which on the Pi, making the entire soldering procedure much easier even if you’re new to it.

Assembly is actually a rather simple process. First, you disassemble the Maclock, which means detaching the base and exterior case. You will need to remove all of the original circuitry. Now it’s time to install the 3D-printed bezel and snap it into place. Once completed, the LCD is neatly attached behind it, and the custom PCB is inserted into its allotted location at the bottom. Wires must then be routed to the Pi Zero, which is located in the lower compartment with a small speaker module.

Getting the software up and running is also rather straightforward. Flash a copy of Raspberry Pi OS Lite onto a microSD card and boot up the Pi, and you’re almost done. Next, locate a Classic Mac OS disk image file that ends in.hda (don’t forget to obtain a compatible ROM file) then transfer those data to the card using a proper computer. Now, connect to the Pi from another computer on the network and perform a single command to retrieve a setup script from the GitHub repository. The script will install the SheepShaver emulator, configure the display drivers to work with your Waveshare panel (with a custom overlay that can be changed), start python scripts for handling the buttons and brightness control, and start all of the system services. After rebooting, the device should launch into the Macintosh environment without any problems, including that nice startup chime.

I always loved menu bar calendar apps. They let me check upcoming events, add events quickly, and access my calendar without switching apps. It’s one of those small quality-of-life improvements that, once you experience it, you can’t go back from.

My menu bar calendar journey started with Fantastical. It’s one of the best calendar apps on Mac, period. But when Flexibits moved to a subscription model, I couldn’t justify paying for features I wasn’t using. So I moved on.

I then switched to Dato, which is a solid app and served me well for a long time. But it lacks some features, and again, the pricing didn’t feel right. I needed something modern, cleaner, and more affordable. That’s when I discovered Dot.

Is Dot actually worth switching to?

Dot is a menu bar-only Mac calendar app, and it does exactly what it promises without any bloat. It works with iCloud, Google, Outlook, and Exchange by reading directly from your Mac’s built-in Calendar app, so there’s no separate account to create or sign into.

The interface is clean and looks beautiful. At the top, you get a quick glance at today’s event count, the day and date, and a settings icon. You can also add a Day and Year progress bar, which shows how much time is left before the end of the day or year. 

Below that, there’s a month view with small dots marking days that have events scheduled, which makes it easy to spot busy days at a glance. Scroll further and you get a full list of upcoming events.

Adding events is fast and supports natural language input. You can type something like “publish Dot’s review at 11:30 am” or “meeting with Sara at 2 PM” and Dot figures out the rest. You can also jump to any date by pressing F and typing it in, which is a small but genuinely useful touch.

What makes Dot stand out?

A few features make Dot feel more considered than its competition. The first is the customizability. You can change the accent color, choose what information appears in the calendar, and how the calendar appears in the Menu Bar. 

Meeting prep is another feature I like a lot. When you have a video call scheduled, Dot automatically surfaces links from your invite, so you are not digging through your email five minutes before the call. It also supports one-click joining for Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Webex, along with a camera and mic preview so you can check your setup before jumping in.

The Command Bar is another highlight, and a feature I have not seen in any other calendar app. With a single shortcut, I can create events, search my schedule, check world clocks, or copy my day’s agenda without leaving whatever I am doing.

Dot also lets you mark special dates on your calendar by right-clicking any day, giving it a title and a color, and it shows up highlighted with the label on hover. It’s a simple feature, but surprisingly useful for flagging things like deadlines, paydays, or trips.

And these are just some of the features. Dot is one of my favorite Mac apps I discovered in 2026, and I highly recommend you use its 14-day trial to explore the app and check it out for yourself by visiting trydot.app. 

If you are happy with it, you can purchase it for a one-time price of $14.99 (currently $9.99 with the launch code). There’s no subscription and no account required, and your data stays on your Mac. For anyone tired of paying monthly for a calendar app, Dot is the answer.

You may be familiar with the various memes detailing the fact that once you reach middle age, you’re automatically sorted, Harry Potter hat–style, into one of a handful of hobbies, such as sourdough bread making, gardening, or bird-watching. I can’t contradict this, since I’m a middle-aged person who got sorted into bird-watching. But I do know that enjoying birds and their various activities is fun for all ages. Birds are beautiful, interesting, and unpredictable, and it’s fascinating to keep a running life list of all the birds you’ve seen and hope to see in your lifetime.

Whether someone you know is in their bird-watching phase, preparing for this phase, or has been in it for decades, all of these unique gifts—for traveling bird-watchers and backyard bird enthusiasts alike—are things either I or another bird-loving Reviews team member tested, was gifted, or bought IRL and enjoyed.

For more specific equipment recommendations, check out our guides to the Best Smart Bird Feeders and the Best Binoculars. For other gift ideas, check out all our gift guide coverage, including the Best White Elephant Gifts, Best Gifts for Men, and Best Viral TikTok Gifts.

Updated May 2026: I’ve overhauled this guide into a new format, swapped out picks, and added a game, a smart nest box, a journal, and a new jacket. I’ve also ensured that links and prices are up to date.

Our Favorite Smart Bird Feeder

If you love birds, nothing beats seeing them up close and personal, conducting all their birdy activities. I have learned more about birds in the past two years of testing smart bird feeders than I have over my entire lifetime, such as the fact that cowbirds will lay their eggs in other birds’ nests (such as juncos) and the “host” birds will raise the cowbird chicks as their own, even if they look nothing alike. Or that jays and other corvids are scatter-hoarders, and will spend an entire day picking nuts out of a feeder’s seed mix to hide caches around the yard. There are many smart seed feeders on the market, but Birdfy’s high-quality basic model (available with a blue or yellow roof) stands out for its balance of price, features, reliability, and usability without a subscription, making it a great gift option that I have personally given.

A Family Pick

My mom gifted this to my family about 10 years ago, and to this day, it is the single most-played and most-enjoyed game we have ever owned, in any genre. Shuffle the small cards and call them out; players place a blue cardstock square on their bingo card if they have that bird. My son loved it, his friends loved it, neighbors loved it, extended family loved it—it can be played by up to six people at a time, and is suitable for all ages. No reading or parsing of rules required. Best of all, neither my husband nor I minded playing it multiple times a day for years on end (a bonus feature important for any parent of young kids).

For Beginning Birders

Bushnell

Powerview 2 8×21 Binoculars

Experienced birders probably already have a decent set of binoculars, but for the birding-curious, kids, or someone just starting out, quality binoculars and a life list journal ($22) would make a great gift. WIRED contributing reviewer Caramel Quin declared these the Best Budget Binoculars. I bought a set for each member of my family for a cruise to Alaska last summer, and I’m glad I did. They’re lightweight (7.2 ounces) yet sturdy, with an aluminum casing instead of plastic, and small enough to slip into a pocket if you’ll be hiking and don’t want to deal with them around your neck.

A Bird Nerd Classic

David Allen Sibley

“What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing—What Birds Are Doing, and Why”

This 8- by 11-inch hardcover by famed ornithologist David Sibley (known for his Sibley field guides) may be too big and too heavy to fit in a backpack for field reading, but it remains the definitive source for interesting bird facts. Did you know mallard nestlings have only a 15 percent chance of fledging and that once they’re hatched, fewer than half of ducklings survive? And that jays in the Northeastern US often eat paint chips in search of calcium, which doesn’t occur naturally in that region’s soil? Or that chickadees specifically seek out spiders to feed their young for the first week after they hatch, as spiders are high in taurine? Whether you want to or not, you will know all these things and more if you give someone close to you this book.

A Different Kind of Bird Food

My husband and I received this feeder basket and some suet cakes as a gift about 10 years ago. The basket has fallen on the ground countless times; been chewed on and used as gymnastics equipment by squirrels; and survived windstorms, snow, and pretty much everything Pacific Northwest winters have to offer. Sure, looks-wise, it’s seen better days, but it still does the job.

Samuel Potozkin spent months shaping a life-size C-3PO head from plastic filament and careful layers of paint. What started as a simple Star Wars fan project grew into a working machine that listens to spoken words and replies in the droid’s familiar voice. Anyone who has ever wished the golden protocol droid from Star Wars could answer back now has a real version sitting on a shelf or desk.

Potozkin printed the head on a Prusa Core 1 machine with PETG filament and a few wobbly layers. Hours of hand sanding later, the curves are velvety smooth. Primer was then used, followed by many layers of Alclad II chrome paint to achieve the desired reflecting gold surface. To achieve that movie-accurate gloss, apply a final layer of yellow-orange color and seal with clear 2K resin. There was a hiccup when the object fell off the desk and a crack formed, but a dab of glue and putty fixed it and work resumed as usual.

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Inside the hollow head, there’s a Raspberry Pi 5, a tiny microphone, and a speaker, all neatly wired. The Pi runs a special piece of programming that manages the conversation. The sound from the microphone is routed through a Whisper-based speech-to-text system and then to a large language model, which generates a response in the style of C-3PO, the bot from the films. A voice-synthesis layer then converts the text into proper speech that sounds similar to Anthony Daniels’ original performance, with a speaker pushing it all out so the head appears to be speaking to you.

Conversations with the head feel natural, even if there is a small delay between asking and receiving an answer. Ask who the droid is, and you’ll get a nice protocol-droid response. When you ask about Earth, it regales you with statistics in the same super-formal tone that fans associate with the films. The lag was a bit of an issue at first, but with a few code modifications, everything is fine again. When it comes to running the device, no further equipment is required because it is completely self-contained and does not require a separate computer or smartphone app.

He’s also made the complete code and 3D files available on GitHub so that anyone can try their hand at creating their own version. If you’re curious about how the software pipeline works, there’s a lengthy paper on the same repository that explains everything. Potozkin believes that this effort is simply a modest step toward machines that can sit with humans in the real world rather than merely live on a screen all the time.
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