A Singapore robotics startup that spent most of last year turning away investors and telling buyers it was out of stock was named today as the maker of the hands inside Nvidia's first open humanoid robot, after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the partnership at the COMPUTEX conference in Taipei on June 1.
The robot, called the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, has a body from Chinese company Unitree, chips and software from Nvidia, and a pair of five-fingered robotic hands from Sharpa, headquartered in Singapore. Nvidia's vice president of physical AI simulation, Rev Lebaredian, said it goes on sale in October and "anyone can buy it." Stanford Robotics Center, ETH Zurich, Ai2, and UC San Diego have already signed on to use it.
Who is Sharpa and why hasn't anyone heard of them?
Sharpa was founded at the end of 2024 by the three co-founders of Hesai Technology, the world's largest supplier of automotive LiDAR sensors. Those founders are CEO Li Yifan, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and Chief Scientist Sun Kai. Hesai, listed on the Nasdaq, makes the laser sensors used in self-driving cars. The team registered Sharpa in Singapore, with manufacturing and research based in Shanghai, and grew to over 100 employees while barely making a sound publicly.
For most of 2025, the industry did not know who was behind it. "The product was jaw-dropping," one investor told 36Kr, a leading Chinese technology publication. "I reached out as early as August, but they weren't keen to meet. To this day, I don't even know who's in charge."
A second investor said they were told the only route in was through a contact in Hesai's investment team, and was turned away when they raised the subject of fundraising. Several founders who tried to buy the hardware ran into the same wall, being told it was out of stock, and some were invited to test it at Sharpa's Shanghai office instead. The SharpaWave hand, which entered mass production in December 2025, is priced at around $50,000.
What does the SharpaWave do?
The SharpaWave is a robotic hand built to the same size as a human hand. It has 22 movable joints, whereas most standard robot grippers have five to seven. Each fingertip contains a small camera and more than 1,000 pressure sensors, letting it detect contact as light as 0.005 newtons, roughly the weight of a grain of rice.
It won a CES 2026 Innovation Award in the robotics category. In March 2026, Sharpa published research showing a robot using two SharpaWave hands to peel an apple autonomously, completing 73% of peel-and-rotate cycles and succeeding fully on 34% of attempts across four contact-heavy tasks, more than double the previous model's performance. The researchers said it was the first time a robot had peeled an apple using two dexterous hands without human control.
Three weeks before the Nvidia announcement, Sharpa announced partnerships on May 11 with Singapore's public research agency A*STAR, the government industrial developer JTC, and Grab to deploy its robots in food and retail settings inside the Punggol Digital District, in a ceremony attended by Minister of State Alvin Tan from the Ministry of National Development and the Ministry of Trade and Industry.
Unitree, the Chinese company whose body powers the robot, is currently in an IPO hearing at the Shanghai Stock Exchange, seeking to raise 4.2 billion yuan ($620 million) on the same day Nvidia put its name alongside theirs. Sharpa's hands will be inside every unit of the humanoid robot that ships from October, across every lab that orders one.
Damilare Odedina
