Narwal, recognized for its robotic vacuum cleaners and mopping devices, plans to utilize the funds to create an artificial intelligence-driven home appliance.
Chinese home robotics company Narwal Robotics announced on Monday that it has raised $100 million in a fresh financing round led by
Tencent Holdings
And the state-supported Beijing Robotics Industry Development Investment Fund.
Located in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, Narwal specializes in robotic vacuum cleaners and mopping devices. According to an official announcement, the firm intends to utilize the recently acquired funds mainly to create their initial “household embodied-intelligence device,” which is scheduled for release within the next two years.
The upcoming product will come with a portable frame that has one or multiple robot arms, enabling it to tidy spaces off the ground. Additionally, it will have built-in storage capabilities.
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Founder and CEO Zhang Junbin said that current robot cleaners were akin to iPods, while the coming product could herald an “iPhone moment” with its implementation of “three-dimensional spatial recognition and autonomous decision-making”.
Established in 2016 in the neighboring city of Dongguan, Narwal announced a remarkable 130 percent increase in their revenue for last year. The firm also mentioned that their international market presence across more than 50 nations, such as the United States, experienced an impressive surge with almost 700 percent revenue growth. However, they refrained from revealing specific sales numbers.
In spite of the volatile global trading conditions worsened by U.S. tariffs, Narwal intends to enter over 70 additional markets with an aim for at least triple expansion in its total international operations this year.
The firm announced that it was moving on to a pre-IPO financing round next. Among the prominent backers from earlier stages were ByteDance, which owns TikTok, and Source Code Capital.
UBTech Robotics
, which is also supported by Tencent, was launched
listing debut
in Hong Kong during December 2023.
Starting from 2021, Narwal has been exploring embodied intelligence, which involves integrating cognitive functions directly into a physical entity.
Its “double eye” vision recognition technology, which uses two front-facing cameras to mimic human eyesight, was first applied in the Xiaoyao 001 series launched last year. It enables the robots to select cleaning strategies and obstacle avoidance modes based on different types of dirt and obstacles.
Service robots, used for non-manufacturing tasks such as cleaning and delivery, have become a rapidly growing sector. This year, for the first time, China’s statistics bureau disclosed
the yearly production rate of service robots
, which saw an increase of 35.7 percent to almost 1.5 million units in the initial two months, surpassing industrial robots in terms of both growth rate and production volume.
In 2023, the sale of commercial service robots in China reached 53,000 units, with cleaning robots comprising 13.5 percent of this number, placing them as the third-biggest segment, as reported by market research company IDC.
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