AI robotics firm Sharpa has completed financing totaling over 4.5 billion RMB, backed by a lineup of top industrial and financial investors. The investor consortium includes industrial giants Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com and Transsion Holdings, as well as leading investment institutions such as Sequoia China, Qiming Venture Partners, Meituan Longzhu Capital and Photosynthesis Venture Capital.
The raised funds will be dedicated to core technology R&D, global talent recruitment and cultivation, and advancing the real-world deployment of general-purpose robots from technical verification to large-scale commercial application.
Marking a key milestone for real-scene robotic implementation, the world’s first fully autonomous, renovation-free, year-round robotic restaurant — jointly built by Sharpa and DQ — officially launched on August 29 at DQ’s Wujiang Road store in Shanghai.
For the first time in the global robotics industry, Sharpa’s robots independently accomplish the entire 55-step complex workflow of making Blizzard ice cream, covering order receiving, full production and customer delivery. The robotic system runs stably throughout daily business hours from 10:00 to 22:00, operating year-round without continuous human intervention.
Notably, this is the world’s first commercial catering scenario where robots undertake formal chain store operations by strictly following global unified production standards, equipment specifications, raw material requirements and operational norms. The system serves real customers and processes authentic offline orders, realizing true large-scale autonomous robot operation in standard commercial environments.
