The track is so hot that there have been two financings worth tens of millions at the beginning of the year!

In mid-January alone , this blue ocean track has already taken the lead in securing two financings worth tens of millions of yuan, and Chinese manufacturers are working tirelessly to increase their investment in this overseas product market.

One year after its establishment, it ranked third in the sales list of the category on the Meiya website

On January 16, Zhicheng Power (Suzhou) Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Zhicheng Power") once again successfully completed a round of strategic financing with an amount of tens of millions of yuan. The investor was the smart home giant Ecovacs .

In September 2021, Zhicheng Power has not been on the market for a long time, but it is focused on the research and development, production and sales of smart swimming pool cleaning robots . Leveraging the huge dividends of overseas smart garden products, its operations and performance are continuing to grow.

Overseas, SMOROBOT, a brand under Zhicheng Power, has gradually opened up the market in its respective field. Although it has "only" launched two series with a total of more than ten models since its establishment, it has almost covered the mid-to-high-end product price segments in the European and American markets.

In 2022, SMOROBOT launched the Tank series, its first smart pool cleaning robot product , and appeared on Kickstarter, the world's largest crowdfunding platform . In a very short period of time, the Tank series products raised US$381,500, which was 3815% of its initial crowdfunding target amount , which shows that the market response was enthusiastic .

In November of the same year , SMOROBOT ranked third in the "Industry and Science -> Robotics" category on Amazon's US monthly sales list .

Since then, Zhicheng Power has upgraded the performance of the Tank product series and launched the Valor product series, achieving intelligent, precise, time-saving, labor-saving and low-consumption swimming pool cleaning.

Although SMOROBOT is not ranked high in the BS list of smart pool cleaning robots on Amazon , the ratings of many products are still good.

According to the data of independent websites, the visit ranking of smorobot.com is rising rapidly. The US market is the main source of visits to the website, accounting for 91%, and its visits in the US market in December 2024 increased by 105.7% compared with November . Natural search traffic is the number one traffic source, driving 46.62% of desktop visits in December .

From the perspective of search keywords, brand names account for a large proportion, and the first and second most popular keywords both contain "SMOROBOT". Google Trend data also shows that the search volume of "SMOROBOT" has been increasing in recent years.

In more than three years, SMOROBOT's products and solutions have covered the European, North American, Australian and Middle Eastern markets, mainly through professional retail channels, supplemented by e-commerce platforms and independent websites, and its cumulative sales have reached nearly 100 million yuan . In order to better maintain the brand reputation, Zhicheng Power has also established nearly 10 user service centers in the two major markets of the United States and Europe .

Today, Zhicheng Power has nearly 100 technical patents, and its core team still maintains extremely high technical background requirements . Most of them have worked for super companies such as Microsoft, Xiaomi, and DJI.

With the outstanding performance of its products, Zhicheng Power has repeatedly won recognition from capital, and has received four rounds of financing since 2021. In this round of financing, the CFO of Ecovacs Group mentioned that with its differentiated product technology portfolio and market strategy, Zhicheng Power has achieved multiple rounds of product iterations and rapid commercialization in the past few years , winning market recognition.

At the just-concluded CES, Zhicheng Power exhibited many of its main products for the first time, which attracted widespread attention from many North American media and consumers. It was rated as "one of the coolest products of CES2025" and a "game changer" in the pool cleaning robot industry by Android Authority, a well-known American IT technology media .

The product has not yet been launched, but has already received tens of millions of yuan in financing

On the same track, the company that obtained financing earlier than Zhicheng Power this year was Surge Future Robot Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Surge Future").

On January 13, Zhuichuang Venture Capital announced that Surge Future had completed its angel round of financing, with a total financing amount of approximately tens of millions of yuan. This round of financing was led by Zhuichuang Venture Capital and followed by Yipu Fund.

It is worth noting that Zhuichuang Venture Capital is an industrial fund established in August 2023 by another smart home giant, Zhuimi . It focuses on the AI+robot track and invests in the four core sectors of upstream hardware, robot software, industrial robots, and service robots around the upstream and downstream of the pan-robot industry chain.

It is reported that the funds from this round of financing will be mainly used to further strengthen Langshong's future R&D investment, focusing on breakthroughs in high-performance underwater sensors, high-precision SLAM and motion control algorithms, and developing high-availability swimming pool intelligent detection and maintenance products.

Surge Future is very "new". According to information, in 2023 it began to recruit members from well-known universities such as Tsinghua University, Wuhan University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Zhejiang University, Imperial College London, Nanjing University, and Shanghai Jiaotong University , and required them to have accumulated profound R&D experience in the fields of service robots and intelligent cleaning .

After the start-up team was formed , Langyong Technology began to create a rich range of pool cleaning robot products, focusing on providing comprehensive ecological solutions for outdoor courtyard swimming pools, not limited to a single cleaning need.

At present, the team size of Surge Future is close to 100 people, and product technology R&D personnel account for nearly 50%. It is reported that the company has comprehensive technical R&D and application capabilities for underwater robots.

In the second year after its establishment ( 2024), Surge Future officially launched three product projects. At the just-concluded CES2025 exhibition, its wireless swimming pool robot Z1 series and water surface cleaning robot J1 made their debut . In the first half of this year, the products developed will be launched into the market one after another .

In the future, it will also launch home pool cleaning robots (including underwater and surface cleaning robots), commercial pool cleaning robots, pool intelligent water quality testing equipment and other products to build a diversified pool cleaning robot product line.

However, Langyong Future has not yet launched its own brand . As an ecological chain enterprise of Dreame , it mainly provides ODM services and develops and produces swimming pool cleaning robot products for Dreame .

Relying on Dreame's channel resources, Langyong will establish long-term cooperative relationships with leading supermarkets and garden machinery dealers in Europe and the United States in the future, and at the same time begin to build e-commerce channels.

Although it does not yet have its own brand, the strong team strength has brought rich technical reserves. Currently , more than 80% of the core components of Langsurge Future are independently designed and manufactured , and the proportion of self-production ranks among the top in the industry . In the future, it may be able to start sales of independent brands in addition to ODM business.

There is no doubt that the smart pool cleaning market has continued to be hot in recent years, and Chinese brands have attracted great attention from overseas consumers.

On Amazon, AIPER, a smart swimming pool machine brand from Shenzhen, often ranks first in the Amazon sub-category BS list. Nine of the top 50 listings are from this brand. In addition, Chinese brands such as Seauto, WYBOT, and Beatbot also occupy the top position in the list .

It is foreseeable that in this blue ocean track, the most formidable opponents in the future may all come from China.

Track

Financing