Sharpa
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Last reviewed
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| Sharpa | |
|---|---|
| General information | |
| Full name | Sharpa Pte. Ltd. |
| Founded | 2024 (end of 2024) |
| Founders | Li Yifan (David Li), Xiang Shaoqing, Sun Kai |
| Headquarters | Singapore |
| Other offices | Shanghai (R&D and manufacturing); Mountain View, California (business operations) |
| Industry | Robotics, Artificial intelligence |
| Employees | 100+ (as of early 2026) |
| Products | SharpaWave dexterous hand, North humanoid robot, CraftNet AI model |
| Key technology | Dynamic Tactile Array (DTA), visuo-tactile sensing, dexterous manipulation |
| Website | sharpa.com |
Sharpa is a Singapore-headquartered artificial intelligence robotics company founded at the end of 2024 that develops high-performance general-purpose robots and core robotic components. The company specializes in human-scale dexterous manipulation, tactile sensing, and autonomous fine-manipulation systems. Sharpa was established by Li Yifan, Xiang Shaoqing, and Sun Kai, the same three co-founders behind Hesai Technology, the world's leading supplier of automotive LiDAR. The company is best known for SharpaWave, a 22-degree-of-freedom dexterous robotic hand that won a CES 2026 Innovation Award, and for North, a humanoid robot that played fully autonomous ping-pong against human opponents at the same trade show.[1][2][3]
Sharpa operates as an independent venture with no equity or business control relationship with Hesai. Its global headquarters and corporate functions sit in Singapore, while its manufacturing and most of its research and development activities are concentrated in Shanghai. A separate office in Mountain View, California, supports business operations and customer engagement in North America.[2][3][4]
Sharpa was incorporated in Singapore at the end of 2024 by three founders who had previously co-founded Hesai Technology, the Nasdaq-listed LiDAR manufacturer based in Shanghai. The trio consists of Li Yifan, who serves as chief executive of Hesai; Xiang Shaoqing, Hesai's chief technology officer; and Sun Kai, the company's chief scientist. According to reporting by Chinese technology outlet 36Kr, the founders treat Sharpa as a "second entrepreneurial project" and serve in strategic advisory and direction-setting capacities at Sharpa rather than holding day-to-day operational positions there.[2][4]
The founders have publicly described their interest in robotics as a natural extension of Hesai's expertise in spatial perception. Hesai's core competence is in LiDAR sensors that allow autonomous machines to perceive three-dimensional environments, and Sharpa's leadership has suggested that the long-term market for robotics-grade LiDAR may eventually exceed the market for automotive LiDAR. Despite this strategic alignment, Sharpa is structured as a fully separate corporate entity, recruits most of its core team externally rather than transferring staff from Hesai, and operates with its own brand, balance sheet, and product roadmap.[2][4]
Li Yifan, who is also referred to publicly as David Li, holds a bachelor's degree in precision instruments and mechanology from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his doctoral research focused on humanoid robotics and high-precision motion control. Before co-founding Hesai, he worked as a principal engineer at Western Digital Corporation in Silicon Valley, where he specialized in high-speed, high-precision disk-head motion control. Xiang Shaoqing earned his undergraduate degree at Tsinghua in the same precision instruments and mechanology program and then completed dual master's degrees at Stanford University in electrical and mechanical engineering, after which he worked on iPhone system integration at Apple. Sun Kai studied mechanical engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. The three founders' overlapping expertise in mechatronics, motion control, and product engineering forms the technical backbone of Sharpa's hardware program.[2]
Sharpa publicly introduced its first product, the SharpaWave dexterous hand, in May 2025. Over the following months the company demonstrated the hand at industry events and shipped early units to research customers. In October 2025, Sharpa held a demonstration at IROS 2025, the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, held in Hangzhou, China. At IROS 2025 the SharpaWave performed tactile sensing tasks, manipulated playing cards, took autonomous photographs, and dealt and played blackjack with attendees.[5][6]
On October 16, 2025, Sharpa announced that it had begun shipping the SharpaWave to customers. On December 16, 2025, the company announced that the product had entered mass production, accompanied by automated reliability and endurance testing systems designed to validate thousands of microscale gears, motors, and sensors per unit. On November 6, 2025, the SharpaWave was named a CES 2026 Innovation Awards Honoree in the Robotics category, drawn from a field of more than 3,600 submissions to that year's program.[6][7][8]
Sharpa achieved broad public visibility at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, held January 6 through 9, 2026, where it exhibited at booth 9251 in the LVCC North Hall. In addition to displaying the SharpaWave hand, the company introduced its first full-body humanoid robot, North, and a new artificial intelligence model called CraftNet. The North robot played fully autonomous matches of ping-pong against human opponents during eight-hour daily live sessions across the four days of the show. The booth's other demonstrations included photography (more than 2,000 instant photos captured during the show), assembly of paper windmills (more than 300 windmills assembled, with chains of more than 30 consecutive successful steps), and card dealing using multimodal vision and language processing. The demonstrations generated significant social media engagement and were widely covered by trade press.[8][9][10]
According to Bowei Liu, a Sharpa representative who spoke with reporters at the event, the North system reacts to changes in its environment in approximately 0.02 seconds. Alicia Veneziani, who serves as Sharpa's global vice president of go-to-market and president of Europe, told reporters that while many humanoid robots can already demonstrate athletic feats such as dancing or backflips, manipulation of objects with human-like precision remains the harder unsolved problem the company is targeting.[9][10]
The SharpaWave is Sharpa's flagship product and the foundation of its product portfolio. It is a human-scale, biomimetic robotic hand designed to replicate the size, range of motion, and tactile sensitivity of an adult human hand. The product entered mass production in October 2025 and won a CES 2026 Innovation Award.[5][6][7]
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Active degrees of freedom | 22 |
| Form factor | 1:1 human hand scale |
| Weight | Approximately 1,200 g |
| Dimensions | Approximately 200 mm x 90 mm x 50 mm |
| Fingertip force | More than 20 N |
| Operating speed | More than 4 Hz across all gestures |
| Tactile pixels per fingertip | More than 1,000 |
| Force precision | 0.005 N over a 0 to 30 N range |
| Force sensing | 6-dimensional force detection per fingertip |
| Data frame rate | 180 frames per second |
| Spatial resolution | Less than 1 mm |
| Communication | Standard Ethernet interface |
| Sensing technology | Dynamic Tactile Array (DTA) with miniature cameras |
| Indicative price | Around USD 50,000 |
The hand replicates 22 active joints, broadly comparable in joint count to the dexterous hand on Tesla's Optimus humanoid platform. Each fingertip integrates a miniature camera alongside more than 1,000 tactile pixels, giving the system both visual and pressure-based feedback at the point of contact. The fingertips can sense forces ranging from feather-light touches to heavy loads with 0.005 N precision, and the hand provides 6-dimensional force detection, supporting dynamic grip control and slip prevention during manipulation.[3][5][6]
From a maintainability perspective, the SharpaWave is designed in a modular configuration in which individual fingers can be replaced without rebuilding the entire hand. Sharpa positions this as an advantage for industrial customers compared with unibody alternatives, since damaged fingers can be swapped out rather than triggering a full unit replacement. Pricing was reported by 36Kr to be in the tens of thousands of US dollars, with a figure of approximately USD 50,000 cited by industry coverage.[2][6]
Demonstrated capabilities of the SharpaWave include cracking and peeling eggs, cutting with scissors, manipulating cards, folding paper, operating industrial tools, and playing table tennis when mounted on a robotic platform. The hand is sold to global technology companies and top research universities as both a standalone manipulator and as a building block of the larger North humanoid system.[2][5][6][7]
North is Sharpa's first full-body autonomous humanoid robot, unveiled at CES 2026. North is built around a pair of SharpaWave dexterous hands attached to a torso with extensive neck, shoulder, and waist range of motion, and it moves on a wheeled base that can position the upper body to reach and react to dynamic targets. The system is intended as a full-stack manipulation platform capable of learning multiple fine-manipulation tasks rather than being purpose-built for a single application.[8][9]
Notable demonstrations at CES 2026 include autonomous ping-pong rallies against human opponents, with reaction times reported at approximately 0.02 seconds, autonomous photography with positioning accuracy described in the millimeter range, autonomous assembly of paper windmills with sequences of more than 30 consecutive successful steps, and autonomous card dealing. Sharpa has indicated that a production version of North is expected in mid-2026 and is targeted at retail, hospitality, food-service, and domestic environments.[8][9][10]
Alongside North, Sharpa introduced CraftNet at CES 2026, an end-to-end hierarchical vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) model that controls the company's manipulation platforms. CraftNet is structured as a two-layer control system. The lower layer, which Sharpa calls the "Interaction Brain," handles fine-grained contact responses such as adjusting grip force in reaction to slip or surface compliance. The upper layer, the "Motion Brain," handles coordinated whole-body motion, planning, and task sequencing. The architecture is positioned by the company as targeting what it calls "last-millimeter" precision, the regime in which contact-rich manipulation tasks are decided by sub-centimeter accuracy. Sharpa has indicated that CraftNet will be released as a series of phased updates rather than as a single discrete release.[8]
Sharpa's principal technological differentiator is its Dynamic Tactile Array (DTA) sensing system. DTA combines vision-based sensing in the form of a miniature camera embedded in each fingertip with a dense array of more than 1,000 tactile pixels per fingertip. A neural-network-based algorithm fuses the data from these two modalities to produce force estimates with 0.005 N precision across a 0 to 30 N range, sampled at 180 frames per second with sub-millimeter spatial resolution. The system is therefore able to interpret contact information across a wide dynamic range, supporting tasks that span delicate operations such as cracking an egg through to firm grasping of heavier industrial tools.[5][6]
Sharpa frames this approach as "feel by seeing," or visuo-tactile sensing, in which the optical and mechanical channels reinforce each other rather than acting as independent inputs. In practice, this allows the SharpaWave to detect incipient slip events and adjust grip in real time, and it allows downstream policies such as CraftNet to reason jointly about visual and tactile evidence at the point of contact.[5][8]
Sharpa supplies the SharpaWave with an open, developer-oriented software stack. The hand is shipped with SharpaPilot, a control application that includes example workflows for reinforcement learning, and the company maintains a public documentation portal under the sharpa-robotics GitHub organization. The platform is compatible with widely used robotic simulation environments including NVIDIA Isaac Lab, Isaac Gym, PyBullet, and MuJoCo, allowing customers to develop and benchmark policies in simulation before deploying to physical hardware. The SharpaWave communicates with host computers using a standard Ethernet interface, simplifying integration into existing research and industrial setups.[5][6][8]
To support its move into mass production, Sharpa developed automated reliability and endurance testing systems that validate the performance of the thousands of microscale gears, motors, and sensors that make up each SharpaWave unit. Sharpa describes these testing systems as "highly automated" and as a key prerequisite for delivering consistent units at scale. The hand's modular design, in which individual fingers can be replaced rather than the whole unit, is positioned as a serviceability advantage that lowers downtime and total cost of ownership for industrial customers compared with unibody alternatives.[6][7]
Sharpa is incorporated in Singapore as Sharpa Pte. Ltd. The company employs more than 100 people across its three offices as of early 2026, with most core team members recruited externally rather than transferred from Hesai. The Singapore headquarters supports global corporate functions and partnerships, the Shanghai office hosts the bulk of the company's research, development, and manufacturing activities, and the Mountain View, California, office handles business operations and customer engagement in the United States. Public reporting describes Sharpa's leadership as deliberately maintaining limited media visibility during its first year, with one investor quoted by KrASIA characterizing the SharpaWave as "jaw-dropping" while also noting difficulty obtaining direct meetings or fundraising information from the company.[1][3][4][8]
Sharpa's stated mission is to "manufacture time by making robots useful," framing the company's products as tools that take over repetitive or strenuous tasks so that humans can spend their time on more meaningful work. The company's near-term commercial focus is on scientific research customers, including leading global technology companies and top research universities, with longer-term plans to expand into service environments such as retail, hospitality, and food service, and ultimately into household applications. AI investor Fu Sheng, quoted by 36Kr, described the North robot as having accomplished "the most difficult tasks" among current humanoid demonstrations, reflecting the broader industry view that contact-rich fine manipulation is one of the harder unsolved problems in humanoid robots.[2][4][8]