Sharpa Raises $669M, Opens Fully Automated Dairy Queen Robot Restaurant
The AMW Read
Sharpa’s reported $669M raise and commercial Dairy Queen deployment materially expand the humanoid-robot player map, while the financing size makes it a capital-cycle signal; the restaurant remains an early single-site proof point.
Sharpa Raises $669M, Opens Fully Automated Dairy Queen Robot Restaurant
Sharpa, the AI robotics startup founded in 2024 by the three co-founders of LiDAR maker Hesai Technology, said it has raised more than RMB 4.5 billion (about $669 million) from investors including Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com, Transsion, HongShan, Qiming Venture Partners, Luminous Ventures, and Long-Z Investments. The company said the financing values it at RMB 22 billion ($3.3 billion) post-money. It announced the deal alongside the August 29 opening of a Dairy Queen robot restaurant on Wujiang Road in Shanghai with CFB Group.
At the store, Sharpa says its humanoid robots autonomously complete a 55-step Blizzard order flow, from order receipt through preparation, handoff, and the inverted serving trick, using Dairy Queen’s standard commercial equipment without modifying the site. That makes the announcement more consequential than a lab demonstration: it tests whether a general-purpose humanoid can deliver repeatable service in a live, customer-facing workflow for 12 hours a day. The company’s claim is a commercial deployment milestone, not yet independent evidence of operating reliability or unit economics.
Sharpa’s $669 million raise turns a single flagship location into a well-funded attempt to move embodied AI from technical validation to deployed service work. For builders and investors, the decisive next evidence will be site-level metrics such as uptime, intervention rates, throughput, labor economics, and rollout beyond one restaurant, rather than the publicity value of a first opening. The investor group also gives Sharpa potential strategic distribution relationships, although the article describes no commercial commitments beyond the Dairy Queen partnership.
