Source: Jiemian News  20th Jan 2026

January 19 (Yicai Global) Three co-founders of Hesai Technology, a listed laser radar (LiDAR) company—Xiang Shaoqing, Li Yifan and Sun Kai—have co-founded a new firm named Sharpa, which focuses on developing general-purpose robots and their core components.

The trio serve as Sharpa’s co-founders, responsible for strategic guidance, planning and setting the overall development direction, but they hold no practical operational positions in the company. Sharpa operates independently, with no equity affiliation or business control ties to Hesai Technology. Most of its core team members are externally recruited, and the company now has over 100 employees.

In an interview with LatePost Auto, the three co-founders of Hesai Technology revealed that Sharpa was founded in late 2024 with a clear product roadmap. Its first product is the SharpaWave dexterous hand, which is set for mass production in October 2025. Boasting 22 movable joints, it has the same number of degrees of freedom as Tesla’s 3rd-generation Optimus dexterous hand, and is capable of performing complex tasks such as playing table tennis, poker and origami, with a price tag of several tens of thousands of US dollars. The second product is Sharpa North, a general-purpose humanoid robot.

Sharpa’s first-generation products are currently mainly used for scientific research and experiments. Its second-generation products are planned to enter service scenarios, with the ultimate goal of large-scale adoption in household settings.

Hesai Technology is a leading provider of 3D LiDAR solutions. Its products are applied in passenger and commercial vehicles equipped with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles and robotics.

While the three founders stated in the interview that Sharpa is more like their second entrepreneurial project and that their main focus remains on Hesai Technology, the AI-focused Sharpa is expected to broaden the team’s horizons and feed back into Hesai’s development. Moreover, the future market scale of LiDAR for robotics is likely to surpass that of the automotive LiDAR market.

On November 11 last year, Hesai Technology released its unaudited financial results for the third quarter of 2025. In Q3, the company achieved a revenue of 800 million yuan, representing a year-on-year increase of 47.5% and marking six consecutive quarters of year-on-year growth. Its net profit hit a record high of 260 million yuan, meeting its full-year profit target one quarter ahead of schedule. Total LiDAR deliveries reached 441,398 units, including 380,759 ADAS products (a year-on-year surge of 193.1%) and 60,639 products for the robotics sector (a whopping year-on-year jump of 1311.9%).

On January 1, Hesai Technology announced that its full-year LiDAR deliveries in 2025 exceeded 1.6 million units, with approximately 1.4 million units being ADAS products.

At the CES 2026 earlier this month, Hesai Technology further announced its plan to double its annual production capacity from 2 million units in 2025 to 4 million units in 2026, to meet the surging demand for LiDAR in the ADAS and robotics fields. In addition, the construction of the company’s new plant in Bangkok, Thailand, is progressing steadily, with production scheduled to start in early 2027.

On January 6, Hesai Technology revealed that it has been selected by NVIDIA as the exclusive LiDAR partner for the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 platform—a reference compute and sensor architecture designed to enable Level 4 (L4) autonomous driving for various vehicle models.