The three founders of Hesai Technology have embarked on a new cross - border entrepreneurial journey, establishing a robotics company named Sharpa.

On January 19th, according to Yicai, three founders of the lidar listed company Hesai Technology, Xiang Shaoqing, Li Yifan, and Sun Kai, jointly founded a new company named Sharpa, which mainly develops general-purpose robots and their core components.

The three are the co-founders of Sharpa, responsible for strategic guidance, planning, and setting the overall direction, but they do not hold actual positions. Sharpa operates independently and has no equity or business control relationship with Hesai. Most of its core members are recruited externally, and currently the company has more than 100 employees.

According to an interview by LatePost Auto with the three co-founders of Hesai Technology, Sharpa was founded at the end of 2024 and has already defined its product roadmap. Its first product is the dexterous hand SharpaWave, which will go into mass production in October 2025. It has 22 movable joints, the same degree of freedom as the third-generation dexterous hand of Tesla's Optimus. It can play table tennis, poker, fold paper, etc., and is priced at tens of thousands of dollars. The second product is the general-purpose humanoid robot Sharpa North.

Sharpa's first-generation products are currently mainly used for scientific research and experiments. The second-generation products are planned to enter service scenarios and eventually be widely used in households.

Hesai Technology is mainly engaged in providing three-dimensional lidar (LiDAR) solutions. The company's products are applied in passenger cars and commercial vehicles supporting advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles, and the robotics field.

Although the three said in the interview that Sharpa is more like their second entrepreneurial project, and they will still focus most of their energy on Hesai. However, for Hesai, Sharpa will broaden the team's vision and benefit Hesai in return. In the future, the market volume of robot lidar may exceed that of automotive lidar.

On November 11th last year, Hesai Technology released its unaudited financial data for the third quarter of 2025. In this quarter, Hesai achieved a revenue of 800 million RMB, a year-on-year increase of 47.5%, with six consecutive quarters of year-on-year growth. The net profit reached 260 million RMB, a record high, and the annual profit target was achieved one quarter ahead of schedule. The total delivery volume of lidar was 441,398 units, among which the delivery volume of ADAS products was 380,759 units, a year-on-year increase of 193.1%, and the delivery volume of products in the robotics field was 60,639 units, a significant year-on-year increase of 1311.9%.

On January 1st, Hesai Technology announced that the annual delivery volume of Hesai lidar in 2025 exceeded 1.6 million units, among which the annual delivery volume of ADAS products was approximately 1.4 million units.

At the beginning-of-the-month CES 2026, Hesai Technology also announced that to meet the growing demand for lidar in the ADAS and robotics fields, the company plans to double its annual production capacity from 2 million units in 2025 to 4 million units in 2026. In addition, the construction of Hesai's new factory in Bangkok, Thailand, is progressing steadily and is expected to be put into operation in early 2027.

On January 6th, Hesai Technology announced that it has been selected by NVIDIA as the lidar partner for the "NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 platform". This platform is a reference computing and sensor architecture designed to help various vehicle models achieve L4-level autonomous driving.

This article is from "Jiemian News", author: Shen Xiaoge, published by 36Kr with authorization.