Sharpa unveils North humanoid and SharpaWave hand at CES 2026

Sharpa, a Singapore-headquartered AI robotics company, unveiled North, its first full-body humanoid robot, at CES 2026 on January 6, alongside four fully autonomous live demonstrations across the show floor. The debut followed Sharpa's December 2025 announcement that it had begun mass producing SharpaWave, its flagship dexterous robotic hand, with early customers including global technology companies and leading research universities.

The company

Sharpa was founded in 2024 and maintains its global headquarters in Singapore, with manufacturing R&D in Shanghai and business operations in Mountain View, California. Despite generating significant attention in venture capital and robotics research circles through 2025, the company's founders kept an unusually low profile. At ICRA in May 2025, where SharpaWave's dexterous hand first drew industry attention, investors attempting to arrange meetings with the company were unable to make contact; one investor told Chinese tech publication 36Kr they still did not know who the senior leadership was after months of trying.

Chinese-language coverage has reported that Sharpa's founding team has connections to Hesai Technology, the Shanghai-based LiDAR manufacturer listed on Nasdaq. Hesai was added to the US Department of Defense's list of Chinese military-related companies in January 2024 and lost a court challenge to that designation in July 2025. The Singapore registration and the founders' deliberate anonymity appear to reflect that geopolitical backdrop directly; a robotics company with Chinese engineering roots and US commercial ambitions has clear reasons to manage its public-facing entity structure carefully.

The hand

SharpaWave is a human-scale robotic hand with 22 active degrees of freedom and Sharpa's proprietary Dynamic Tactile Array technology. Each fingertip integrates a miniature camera alongside more than 1,000 tactile pixels, capturing forces from feather-light contact to heavy loads with 0.005 Newton precision. The hand can apply up to 30 Newtons of fingertip force, open and close more than four times per second, and resolve physical features smaller than one millimetre. The fingertip resolution matches or exceeds the specification Elon Musk spent much of 2025 publicising for Tesla Optimus Gen 3's hand.

Sharpa has developed automated reliability and endurance testing systems that validate the performance of thousands of microscale gears, motors, and sensors across each production unit, targeting the consistency expected of mission-critical hardware such as automotive components. Pricing for SharpaWave has not been disclosed publicly.

The robot

North's four CES demonstrations were fully autonomous. The robot rallied in ping-pong against human opponents with a 0.02-second reaction time, captured photos with approximately two millimetres of positioning precision, dealt cards using multimodal vision and language reasoning, and built a paper windmill through a 30-plus step assembly sequence maintaining hand-eye-tactile coordination throughout.

North runs CraftNet, a vision-tactile-language-action model designed specifically for contact-rich manipulation tasks, where fine physical feedback determines the outcome rather than position control alone. Sharpa's training approach uses more than 20,000 hours of egocentric human video with no robot in the loop; the model learns from watching humans perform tasks rather than from robot teleoperation data. That distinction matters for generalisation; human video is vastly more abundant than robot demonstration data, and training on it avoids the morphology gap between the human demonstrator and the robot body.

Maturity

SharpaWave is in mass production with unnamed early customers. North has been publicly demonstrated with four autonomous tasks; no pricing, commercial availability date, or deployment customer has been disclosed for the full robot. Sharpa has not published continuous uptime data across multiple units or independent performance benchmarks for any of the demonstrated capabilities. The company's founding team has not been publicly identified.

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