Sharpa

Robotics · Embodied AI · Food & Beverage Tech

Funding

Hesai founders' Sharpa raises $670M, opens autonomous robot restaurant

The robot works at roughly half a human worker's speed, betting that automotive-style mass production will eventually make the math work.

• Sharpa disclosed over 4.5 billion yuan (about $670M) in cumulative funding led by Alibaba and Tencent, valuing the robotics startup at roughly 22 billion yuan (~$3.3B) post-money.
• Founded in late 2024 by Hesai Technology's three co-founders — CEO David Li, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and chief scientist Sun Kai — Sharpa builds dexterous robot hands and humanoid robots for real-world manipulation tasks.
• The same week, Sharpa and CFB Group's Dairy Queen opened a Shanghai store where a Sharpa humanoid robot autonomously runs a 55-step Blizzard-making process on DQ's unmodified equipment, open daily with no environment changes.
• The robot takes about 6 minutes per Blizzard versus roughly 2-3 minutes for a trained human employee, roughly half the speed of a skilled worker.
• Co-founder Li Yifan acknowledged the deployment isn't yet profitable, framing a scenario as only truly viable once it crosses a reliability "kill line" where customers keep using it without human backup.
• The store is billed as one of the first times a humanoid robot has run a complex, multi-step commercial food-service task fully autonomously and continuously, a real test of whether embodied AI can move from staged demos to paying deployments.