Sharpa

Sharpa is a full-stack AI robotics company developing general-purpose humanoid robots and their core components. Founded in late 2024 with its headquarters in Singapore, the firm also maintains a manufacturing and R&D center in Shanghai and business operations in Mountain View, California. The company was established by the co-founders of Hesai Technology, a publicly listed LiDAR manufacturer: CEO David Li, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and Chief Scientist Sun Kai. This founding team possesses extensive backgrounds in robotics, mechanical engineering, and motion control from institutions like Tsinghua University, Stanford, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Sharpa's business objective is to develop robots capable of operating autonomously in real-world environments without modification, thereby addressing the "manipulation bottleneck" in robotics. The company's product line is centered on two key offerings: the Sharpa Wave, a dexterous, five-fingered robotic hand, and the Sharpa North, a full-body humanoid robot that utilizes the Wave hands. The Wave hand is engineered to match human scale and dexterity, featuring 22 active degrees of freedom and high-resolution tactile sensors on each fingertip, enabling it to handle contact-rich manipulation tasks with precision. It has been selected by NVIDIA to be part of its Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot. The Sharpa North is a 67-DoF humanoid designed for autonomous shifts in service and industrial settings, capable of performing complex, long-horizon tasks. The company's technology is powered by CraftNet, a proprietary Vision-Touch-Language-Action (VTLA) model that integrates multiple sensory inputs to enable precise robot actions. Sharpa's market strategy involves proving its technology in real-world commercial applications. A notable milestone was the launch of a fully automated Dairy Queen restaurant in Shanghai, where Sharpa robots manage the entire 55-step process of making ice cream. The company serves OEM robotics companies, research institutions, and clients in the food and beverage industry, with a long-term goal of producing affordable robots for household use. In August 2026, Sharpa announced it had raised approximately $669 million from investors including Alibaba Group, Meituan, and Tencent Holdings, reaching a post-money valuation of around $3.3 billion. Keywords: humanoid robots, dexterous manipulation, AI robotics, general-purpose robots, robotic hand, Sharpa Wave, Sharpa North, core components, tactile sensing, CraftNet, VTLA model, embodied intelligence, David Li, Xiang Shaoqing, Sun Kai, autonomous robots, service industry automation, manufacturing automation, robot-as-a-service, computer vision, motion control, full-stack robotics, NVIDIA Isaac GR00T, bimanual coordination, real-world autonomy