Full Name
Sharpa Pte Ltd.
About
Sharpa Pte Ltd. is a Singapore-headquartered full-stack AI robotics company founded in late 2024 by the three co-founders of Hesai Technology, the listed lidar maker: Yifan Li (李一帆), who is Hesai's CEO and appears on Sharpa's own site under his English name David Li as Founder; Shaoqing Xiang (向少卿), Hesai's co-founder and CTO; and Kai Sun (孙恺), Hesai's Chief Scientist. The three act as co-founders giving strategic direction, while Sharpa operates independently of Hesai with no equity subordination or operational control, and most of its core staff were hired externally, largely from the dexterous-hand team Hesai assembled in 2024. The company runs across three sites: R&D in Singapore, which is its global headquarters and is anchored there with support from the Singapore Economic Development Board, manufacturing in Shanghai, and business development in Mountain View, California. Its mission is 'We Manufacture Time by Making Robots Useful', and it positions itself not as a hand company but as a tactile-AI-driven full-stack dexterous robotics company, with tactile sensing and tactile AI as what it calls its secret weapon. Sharpa argues that locomotion has advanced faster than manipulation and that this is why robots have not returned time to people, and it works on what it calls the last 1 per cent: tying off a trash bag, clipping a wire into its slot on an assembly line, without human help and without retrofitting the environment. Its Chinese name in press coverage is 大裂谷. On 28 August 2026 the company disclosed financing for the first time since its founding: more than RMB 4.5 billion raised cumulatively at a post-money valuation of RMB 22 billion, from industrial investors including Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com and Transsion, and institutions including Sequoia China, Qiming Venture Partners, Meituan DragonBall and Guanghe Venture Capital. Its product line spans the Wave hands, Dexa, Avatar and North. SharpaWave, also listed as Wave W01, is the founding product: a 1:1 human-scale five-finger hand with 22 active degrees of freedom, direct-drive transmission, a palm-width-to-hand-length ratio of about 0.618, 200 by 90 by 50 mm and 1,200 g, with more than 1,000 tactile sensing units in each fingertip; it debuted at ICRA in May 2025, went into mass production in October 2025, was named a CES 2026 Innovation Awards Honoree in December 2025, and was chosen for the H2 Plus humanoid reference design that Unitree and NVIDIA announced in June 2026, replacing Unitree's own hand. W02 is a smaller, lighter fully tactile hand, and AE01 is a haptic exoskeleton data glove. North is the company's first full-body robot, a 67-degree-of-freedom wheeled humanoid that combines a wheeled mobile base with a humanoid upper body; it performed fully autonomous manipulation for four consecutive days at CES 2026 and dealt with a 30-plus step paper windmill assembly, and it worked a full shift behind the counter of a Dairy Queen store on Wujiang Road in Shanghai from 29 August 2026, completing a 55-step Blizzard ice cream workflow in which 98 per cent of steps involve direct tactile input. The intelligence layer is CraftNet, a hierarchical VTLA model with a System 2 that plans, a System 1 that moves and a System 0 that closes contact. Sharpa also launched Wave SE with pre-orders on 19 August 2026, and its hand appeared on China's Spring Festival Gala. The company has said its ambition is to replicate what lidar did for autonomous driving, in humanoid robotics.
Technical Overview
Contact Information
Robot Products
Funding History
Total $625M| Round | Amount | Valuation | Date | Investors | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other | $625M | $3.1B | Aug 2026 | Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com, Transsion, Sequoia China, Qiming Venture Partners, Meituan DragonBall, Guanghe Venture Capital | Source |
Development Timeline
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