A robot named Sharpa, working inside a DQ outlet, takes exactly 55 steps to craft an Oreo Blizzard, autonomously handling everything from order taking to final delivery. This glimpse into the future is the work of a Shanghai-based AI robotics company that has just raised over 4.5 billion yuan and is now valued at a staggering 22 billion yuan.

Sharpa, headquartered in Shanghai, was co-founded by Hesai Technology CEO Li Yifan, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and Chief Scientist Sun Kai in December 2024, with roots tracing back to the autonomous driving sensor maker. The company completed its latest funding round in late August, attracting investments from industrial heavyweights like Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com, as well as venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital China and Meituan Longzhu, catapulting its post-investment valuation to 220 billion yuan.

This level of capital injection is not unprecedented for Sharpa, which secured a 100 million yuan cash infusion from Hesai in April 2025, just four months after its inception, at a 1 billion yuan valuation. In the swift span of 16 months, the company's worth has multiplied by 21 times.

Despite its rapid growth, Sharpa has maintained a remarkably low-key public profile, a trait inherited from its core team hailing from Hesai. It only launched its official WeChat public account in July 2026 and currently operates solely an English website, showing clear global ambitions. As early as May 2025, the team was already active on overseas social media platforms and attended the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation with its first product, the Wave dexterous hand.

The Wave hand, boasting a 1:1 human-sized design with 22 active degrees of freedom and over 1,000 tactile sensing units on its fingertips, offers high precision in touch perception. The rapid six-month development timeline from company founding to product launch was heavily supported by Hesai, which signed an intellectual property license and transfer agreement with Sharpa in May 2025, allowing the startup to purchase its proprietary technology for 36.967 million yuan.

Just two months later, a viral video showcased a humanoid robot autonomously grilling a burger, a feat accomplished through active vision, high-precision touch, and the same high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hands from Sharpa. The robot's performance, completing the entire operational sequence in 2.5 minutes, is based on the ViTacFormer framework, jointly proposed by Sharpa with UC Berkeley and Peking University, which integrates visual and tactile data with future tactile prediction mechanisms for greater precision and stability.

In August 2025, Hesai transferred its 10% stake in Sharpa to two independent third-party investors for 276 million yuan in cash, valuing Sharpa at over 2.7 billion yuan at that time.

Sharpa's founder, Li Yifan, describes this as his second entrepreneurial venture, leveraging the hard-won experience from Hesai in scaling hardware from high costs to mass production. The team's expertise has accelerated Sharpa's progress, with the dexterous hand entering mass production and delivery by October 2025. Notably, the humanoid robot that interacted with celebrity Shen Teng on the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, capable of manipulating walnuts, was equipped with a Sharpa hand.

With a price tag of up to $50,000 per unit, the Sharpa Wave is positioned as a premium product in the industry. The collaboration between Sharpa and Hesai has deepened, evident in a second intellectual property transfer agreement in December 2025 valued at 4.018 million yuan. While starting with components, the team has now introduced its own full humanoid robot, Sharpa unveiled its first humanoid robot in January 2026, featuring 70 degrees of freedom. Public demonstrations have shown it autonomously completing tasks like dealing cards, folding windmills, and playing ping-pong, even folding over 300 windmills at the CES trade show.

The expansion from dexterous hands to complete robots has brought Sharpa's core team into focus, with Hesai's 2025 annual report released in March disclosing that Li Yifan and other executives have served as Sharpa directors since January. Li Yifan has described Sharpa as Hesai's "real-world validation ground," where the same founding team can gain firsthand engineering feedback by working on both the terminal and upstream components. Sharpa's workforce has now grown to over 200 employees, with R&D personnel making up 80% of the team.

Li Yifan and his team are aggressively pushing their products into real-world applications. Following the release of the North robot, they identified the DQ project as a key use case, leading to the creation of the world's first "zero-modification, fully autonomous, year-round" robot Blizzard restaurant on DQ's Wu Jiang Road in Shanghai. Using standard store equipment and processes, the Sharpa robot operates with human tools, seamlessly integrating into the existing space. Perfecting a Blizzard is no small feat; even DQ employees in China require a week of training. However, the North robot, equipped with the Wave dexterous hand, performs the task with precision, using a five-finger wrap-around grip to distribute load and adjust force in real time.

"The key to commercializing robots is not completing a one-off task, but consistently performing complex jobs in a real, unmodified environment over the long term," Li Yifan stated, emphasizing that the choice of a real operating robot restaurant is a step towards proving broad commercial and universal robot capabilities. In his view, the DQ store is a transitional testbed between the lab and the home, allowing the robot to tackle real-world variability while continuously gathering data for future home deployment.

Meanwhile, the company's revenue still leans on its component business, with major clients including top global robot manufacturers and leading research institutions. Hesai's July 2026 announcement revealed a significant increase in its related-party transaction cap with Sharpa, from 100 million yuan to 300 million yuan, covering the supply of LiDAR, power modules, and manufacturing services. The announcement highlighted that the commercialization of Sharpa's dexterous hands is proceeding at an unprecedented pace.

"We have enough high-quality hardware revenue from selling complete robots and dexterous hands, which reduces our pressure," Li Yifan said. While the DQ store has proven the product's utility, the next challenge is to prove its viability at a much larger scale.