General-purpose robotics company Sharpa has raised more than 4.5 billion yuan (about $620 million) in total funding at a post-money valuation of 22 billion yuan (roughly $3 billion). It's the first time the company has publicly disclosed its financing. Investors include Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com, Sequoia Capital China, Qiming Venture Partners, and Meituan Longzhu. Sharpa was co-founded at the end of 2024 by Li Yifan (CEO of lidar maker Hesai Technology), CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and chief scientist Sun Kai, and is focused on dexterous hands, general-purpose robots, and related AI models.
Sharpa isn't rushing into your living room. It wants to start with real commercial scenarios. The company's definition of "actually being able to do work" has three requirements: don't modify the environment for the robot, the robot must complete the whole task itself, and the task needs to be complex and genuinely valuable. Its first proving ground: Dairy Queen stores. The robot has to use the store employees' existing equipment and complete about 55 steps to independently make a Blizzard. Sharpa says the first scenario has been in training for less than five months total, and the robot is currently about half as fast as a human crew member.
Li argues that if a humanoid robot with more than 70 degrees of freedom only does jobs a simple robotic arm could handle, the business math doesn't add up. He also believes Physical AI is unlikely to produce a pure-"brain" company in the OpenAI mold; the eventual winner will look more like Apple, mastering hardware, data, models, and the full device. Sharpa plans to thoroughly work through restaurant, hotel, and retail scenarios first, then start exploring homes from 2028.