At a DQ store on Wujiang Road in Shanghai, a robot is independently completing the entire process from order taking, production to delivery, using the DQ brand’s globally standardized equipment, ingredients and operating specifications. After 55 steps in total, an Oreo Blizzard can meet the serving standard of “no spillage when the cup is turned upside down”.
This is the scene unfolding in the world’s first “zero-renovation, fully autonomous, non-stop operation all year round” robotic Blizzard restaurant. The store opened its reservation channel on August 25, and the first batch of quotas was snapped up in less than a day. On the official opening day of August 29, crowds of people gathered around the store to visit and take photos, with many queuing up holding their mobile phones just to catch a glimpse of the “robot-made Blizzard”.
In the three days since its opening, this Sharpa robot has been on duty for a total of 36 hours, processing a large number of real orders, and the discussion about it on social platforms has remained consistently high.
Such a company that has not yet achieved large-scale commercialization has recently announced a major public announcement at one go: its total financing has exceeded 45 billion yuan, with a post-money valuation of 220 billion yuan. Its investor list is packed with giants including Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, and JD.com, and it is no exaggeration to say that half of China’s mobile internet industry stands behind it.
This company is called Shanghai Rift Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Sharpa”), which was established at the end of 2024 and has a history of less than two years so far. After disclosing its financing situation to the public for the first time since its establishment, it has immediately joined the ranks of unicorns.
Serial Entrepreneurship by Hesai’s Founder,
Delivering a “Unicorn” at the First Move
Behind the bustling scene, many people are curious about who is the developer of this ice cream-making robot.
Sharpa, founded at the end of 2024, has a prominent background. Its founding team consists of core members of Hesai Technology, a listed LiDAR company, namely Li Yifan, CEO of the company, Xiang Shaoqing, CTO, and Sun Kai, Chief Scientist. The three are co-founders of Hesai, and Sharpa is regarded as the collective second-time entrepreneurship of the three.
It is worth mentioning that Hesai, which landed in the secondary market with the aura of “the first share of LiDAR”, has a story that is brilliant and dramatic enough in itself.
Let’s go back to the end of 2012. At that time, during a self-driving tour, Li Yifan dropped in to visit his friend Sun Kai who was studying at Stanford. Half drunk, the two talked about their alumni who had already achieved great success, and came up with the idea of founding their own billion dollar company. After that, the two found Xiang Shaoqing, who was also a Stanford alumnus.
The three hit it off immediately, so Hesai, jointly founded by three post-85s young people Li Yifan, Sun Kai and Xiang Shaoqing, was established in Silicon Valley at the end of 2012. At the time of the company’s establishment, Li Yifan and Sun Kai were still pursuing their doctoral degrees on campus, and only Xiang Shaoqing, who was slightly older, worked as an iPhone hardware engineer at Apple.
It was not until 2014 that the three of them devoted themselves full-time to the entrepreneurship of Hesai, and received angel round financing in the same year. After ten years of development, Hesai was listed on NASDAQ in 2023, and has now grown into a company with a market value of 100 billion yuan listed on two markets, ranking first in the global market share of automotive LiDAR.
Having achieved such results in their first entrepreneurship is the underlying reason why Sharpa, the second-time entrepreneurship project, can quickly gain the trust of the capital market.
According to previous media reports, the three founders are responsible for setting the strategic direction and overall planning at Sharpa, and do not hold specific executive positions. Most of the company’s core team is recruited externally, and there are more than 100 employees at present. There is no equity affiliation or business control relationship between the company and Hesai, and they are completely independent operating entities, but the two sides have business interactions.
In its 2026 interim performance report released in mid-August this year, Hesai stated bluntly that it “provides power modules for Sharpa, the global leading enterprise of AI robots”, and “Sharpa plans to carry out the world’s first ‘zero-renovation’ deployment in DQ’s Shanghai stores in August this year, so as to realize the verification of AI robots in real commercial scenarios. At that time, its robot will independently complete the production process of the signature Blizzard ice cream, verifying its potential to handle complex long-horizon tasks and generalize to diverse real scenarios.”
The zero-renovation deployment mentioned in the interim report is exactly the “robot-made Blizzard” mentioned above.
Sharpa, the second-time entrepreneurship project of the “Hesai trio”, is positioned as a general-purpose robot and core components company focusing on dexterous manipulation. Its first product is the dexterous hand SharpaWave, which has 22 movable joints and can complete fine movements such as playing table tennis, playing cards, and folding paper, with a unit price of tens of thousands of US dollars; the second product is the general-purpose humanoid robot Sharpa North.
Li Yifan said in a previous interview that the final winner in the Physical AI track needs to master four capabilities at the same time: hardware, data, models and complete machines. The company has set three criteria for “truly capable of working”: no need to modify the usage environment for robots, the entire task process is completed independently by the robot, and the task itself is complex enough with practical commercial value. The DQ store is the first verification scenario selected by Sharpa.
The product story is only at the beginning, and what really makes Sharpa known to more people is the subsequent financing disclosure. On August 28, Sharpa publicly disclosed its financing information for the first time — the company has completed cumulative financing of more than 45 billion yuan, with a post-money valuation of 220 billion yuan. This is the first time Sharpa has disclosed specific financing data to the public since its establishment. Since its establishment at the end of 2024, a company that has barely made public announcements has been certified as a “unicorn” as soon as it speaks out.
Investor List
Half of China’s Internet Industry
Specifically, the investors behind Sharpa include industrial capitals such as Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, and JD.com, as well as investment institutions such as HSG and Qiming Venture Partners.
It is not difficult to see from the investor list that several giants in China’s Internet industry who are usually competitors, such as Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent and JD.com, have rarely gathered together.
The fact that four Internet platforms bet on the same robot company at the same time is not rare in the primary market. Taking AutoXing Robot as an example, Meituan led the Series A round, Alibaba Cloud led the A+ round and Meituan’s strategic investment followed suit. In subsequent financing rounds, Internet giants such as ByteDance, Xiaomi, and 58.com have also entered the market one after another; Unitree Robotics is also a target crowded with large factories. Alibaba led its Series C financing in June, and Tencent participated in later rounds; behind Agibot there are also multiple large factories including Tencent and Alibaba; in addition to investing in embodied intelligence industrial chain projects such as Unitree, Starsea Diagram, and Lingxin Qiaoshou, Ant Group has also set up its own subsidiary Lingbo Technology.
Regarding this behavior, industry insiders analyzed that industrial capitals value more the synergistic effect between robot business and their own main business, such as the potential application of Meituan and JD in terminal distribution and warehousing scenarios, and the complementary advantages of Alibaba and Tencent in cloud large model capabilities.
Behind this is also a greater shift in industrial logic. In the past ten years, the capital layout of China’s Internet giants has mainly focused on traffic, e-commerce, and cloud computing. After the demographic dividend of mobile internet peaked, embodied intelligence is widely regarded as the next technology platform that may reshape the productivity entry. Its logic is similar to that personal computers spawned desktop software and smartphones spawned mobile applications in the past — every iteration of hardware platforms will bring a new round of dividends for applications and business models.
When multiple Internet giants are willing to bet on the same early-stage robot company at the same time, to some extent, it indicates that embodied intelligence has gone beyond the judgment stage of “whether to invest” and entered the stage of positioning of “who to invest in and how to invest”.
For Sharpa, the core player, being able to raise funds from “half of the Internet industry” at the same time is also related to its own capital operation method. According to investors who have contacted Sharpa, the company does not cast a wide net in financing like most start-ups. In addition to Hesai’s old shareholders, the rest of the investors are selectively invited. Sharpa’s registered entity is located in Singapore. In addition to its headquarters, it also has bases in Mountain View, the United States and Shanghai, China. This cross-border structure enables it to invite capital parties globally without being limited to the fixed practices of the domestic primary market.
Coincidentally, in the same week that Sharpa disclosed its financing, Silicon Valley venture capital firm a16z across the ocean also announced the completion of a new $1.1 billion “Machine Age” fund, which is dedicated to investing in AI hardware infrastructure, covering chips, memory, data centers and robots.
Capitals from China and the United States turned their attention from pure software to the physical world of “integration of software and hardware” at almost the same time period. This is probably not a coincidence, but a synchronous shift in the way global capital bets on the next technology cycle.
Unicorn Legion of Robots
Is Being Born in Batches
Sharpa, which was listed as a unicorn in less than two years after its establishment, is not an isolated case.
According to industry statistics, in the first half of 2026, there were 322 financing events in China’s embodied intelligence sector, with the total financing amount reaching about 934.7 billion yuan. The semi-annual financing scale has exceeded the level of the whole year of 2025; about 20 new unicorns with a valuation of 100 billion yuan have been added. Data as of June 2026 shows that the number of domestic robot unicorns that meet the criteria of “established no more than 10 years, valued at more than 1 billion US dollars, and not yet listed” has reached 43, a 3.5-fold increase from 12 in 2022.
In addition, research report data shows that in the 12 months from July 2025 to June 2026 alone, the financing in China’s embodied intelligence sector reached 503 events, with the total amount exceeding 960 billion yuan, of which the financing in the first quarter of 2026 exceeded 300 billion yuan, setting a new all-time high for a single quarter.
In June 2026 alone, 36 financing events and 10 large transactions exceeding 1 billion yuan took place, involving companies such as Qianxun Intelligence, Stardust Intelligence, Superb Vision, and Zhipingfang. By the end of June, there were 18 domestic embodied intelligence enterprises with a valuation of over 100 billion yuan, and enterprises such as Starsea Diagram, Galaxy General, AutoXing, and Zhipingfang have even crossed the valuation threshold of 200 billion yuan… The list goes on and on.
Some analysis points out that different from the early capital chasing “technical concepts”, the investment logic in 2026 has undergone profound changes. Capital pays more attention to enterprises’ real scenario verification capabilities, commercialization closed-loop and engineering implementation level, shifting from “betting on concepts” to “actual combat capabilities”.
The primary market is in full swing, and the secondary market is also prosperous. Unitree Robotics is the first of these new unicorns to successfully pass the IPO. As the only humanoid robot company that has achieved the closed loop of “mass production, cost reduction and profitability” so far, Unitree Robotics achieved revenue of 16.99 billion yuan in 2025, non-net profit of 5.91 billion yuan, shipment of 5511 units, and a global market share of 32.4% for pure bipedal humanoid models, ranking first. As of the closing price on September 4, the market value of Unitree Robotics exceeded 200 billion yuan.
In addition to Unitree Robotics, other embodied intelligence enterprises including Luoshi Robotics, Seer Technology, Leju Robotics, and Megvii Robotics have successively landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this year. According to incomplete statistics, there are nearly 50 robot-related companies queuing for IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at present.
Domestic institutions generally predict that the scale of China’s embodied intelligence industry is expected to reach 4 trillion yuan by 2030 and exceed the 10 trillion yuan mark by 2035. Humanoid robots, regarded as the ultimate integration of artificial intelligence and high-end manufacturing, have risen to become one of the core tracks at the national strategic level.
Against such an industry background, the public debut of Sharpa, the unicorn with a valuation of 220 billion yuan, is just the latest footnote in this capital frenzy.
This article is from the WeChat official account “thecapital” (ID: thecapital), author: Feng Xiaoting, published with authorization from 36Kr.