Sharpa raises $670M, opens fully automated humanoid robot restaurant with Dairy Queen in Shanghai
The AMW Read
A mega round (~$670M at $3.3B valuation) from major China tech platforms plus a first fully autonomous humanoid deployment in a real commercial F&B setting meaningfully advances embodied AI commercialization proof, though it extends rather than overturns the existing China humanoid narrative.
Sharpa raises $670M, opens fully automated humanoid robot restaurant with Dairy Queen in Shanghai
Sharpa, an AI robotics startup founded in 2024 by the three co-founders of Nasdaq- and Hong Kong-listed LiDAR maker Hesai Technology — CEO David Li, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and chief scientist Sun Kai — has raised over 4.5 billion yuan (about $670 million) at a reported $3.3 billion post-money valuation. Backers include Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com, Transsion Holdings, HongShan, Qiming Venture Partners, Luminous Ventures, and Meituan's CVC arm Long-Z Investments. A day after disclosing the round, Sharpa opened a fully automated Dairy Queen restaurant on Wujiang Road in Shanghai's Jing'an District, in partnership with CFB Group, where its humanoid robots run a 55-step process to prepare Blizzard ice cream — from order to the signature upside-down handoff — using DQ's standard, unmodified equipment.
The round is one of the largest disclosed for a China-based humanoid robotics company this year, and the investor list — spanning Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, and Meituan alongside VC firms — signals that major Chinese platforms are backing embodied AI deployment in live commercial settings rather than lab demos. Sharpa's zero-modification pitch targets the core commercialization bottleneck in humanoid robotics: operating reliably in unmodified real-world environments over sustained periods, not just completing a task once. The founders' Hesai track record — over $500 million raised privately, a 2023 Nasdaq IPO, and a 2025 Hong Kong dual listing — lends the venture credibility many humanoid robotics startups lack. Per the AI Market Watch index, which tracks roughly 5,000 companies as a coverage sample rather than a census, Sharpa's recorded funding total stood at $100 million before this round.
For investors, the raise extends China's embodied AI funding surge into food-and-beverage as a proving ground for revenue-generating deployment, ahead of Sharpa's stated goal of household robots. For builders, the DQ restaurant is a concrete commercialization template — pairing a humanoid platform with an established franchise partner and off-the-shelf equipment — that other robotics startups chasing real-world validation may look to replicate before claiming general-purpose readiness.
