Sharpa Robotics

Sharpa is a Singapore-headquartered robotics company that builds high-degree-of-freedom tactile hands, a wheeled humanoid robot, and the manipulation models that run on them. It was founded at the end of 2024 by three founders of Nasdaq-listed lidar maker Hesai Technology — Li Yifan, Xiang Shaoqing and Sun Kai — a link the company did not publicise and that Chinese outlets only reported in January 2026. Sharpa keeps its global headquarters in Singapore, manufacturing and R&D in Shanghai, and business operations in Mountain View, California, and said in early 2026 that it employed more than 100 people.

Hardware first: the hand

The company's entry product is SharpaWave, a human-scale five-fingered hand with 22 active degrees of freedom. Sharpa began shipping the hand in October 2025 and later moved to a rolling production process ahead of CES 2026, where SharpaWave was named an Innovation Awards honoree in the robotics category. Its distinguishing feature is the Dynamic Tactile Array: each fingertip pairs a miniature camera with more than 1,000 tactile pixels, which the company frames as "feeling by seeing", with 0.005 N pressure sensitivity and 180 FPS data rates. Reporting citing LatePost put the hand's price at roughly USD 50,000, and described supply as tight relative to demand from model developers.

For current Wave and Wave SE specifications, tactile sensing and software, see our Sharpa Wave hand guide.

Models and the robot

Above the hardware, Sharpa develops manipulation policies for its dual-arm platform, SharpaNorth, which carries two SharpaWave hands across 63 degrees of freedom. In March 2026 the company published work on a mixture-of-experts architecture, MoDE-VLA, paired with a shared-autonomy teleoperation system called IMCopilot, which it used to demonstrate what it called the first autonomous dual-dexterous-hand apple peeling.

Where the hands show up

Sharpa's end-effectors have become a hardware substrate for other labs' software. NVIDIA paired the hands with a Unitree H2 Plus chassis and Jetson Thor compute in its Isaac GR00T reference humanoid, announced at GTC Taipei for October 2026 availability. Google DeepMind used the same 22-DoF hand for knot-tying and fine motor demonstrations in Gemini Robotics 2.

Commercial footing

Sharpa debuted North at CES in January 2026, where the company says it ran uninterrupted eight-hour shifts on fine manipulation tasks. At an inaugural AI Robotics Summit in Singapore in April 2026, it announced work with A*STAR on port container handling, a JTC deployment of North robots and an innovation lab in Punggol Digital District, and an exploration with Grab covering F&B and logistics. In July 2026 it said North would work a Dairy Queen store in Shanghai, running an end-to-end workflow of more than 50 consecutive manipulation steps in a restaurant built for human staff; at least one outlet characterised the deployment as teleoperated rather than autonomous.

In its first publicly disclosed financing, Sharpa raised more than RMB 4.5 billion (about USD 668 million) at an RMB 22 billion post-money valuation, with Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, Meituan, Transsion, HongShan, Qiming Venture Partners, Luminous Ventures and Meituan's Long-Z among the backers. Li has said the company intends to work through catering, hotel and retail deployments before attempting household products from 2028. It sells into a crowded end-effector market that includes Wuji Tech and WiRobotics, but is unusual in shipping the hand, the robot and the policy stack together.