MaKe | MaHui Member Narwal Raises Another $100 Million, Officially Enters Pre-IPO Stage

• This article is republished from 36Kr's Hard Kr, by author Huang Nan.

Hard Kr has learned exclusively that home cleaning service robot company Cloud Whale recently completed a $100 million funding round, co-led by Tencent and Beijing Robotics Industry Development Investment Fund, with Science Fiction Fund and Future Capital adding to their stakes. Gengxin Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor. The funds will be prioritized for Cloud Whale's Embodied Artificial Intelligence product R&D, global market expansion, and multi-category strategic layout.

This also marks Cloud Whale's new funding round following its late-2024 raise. The company has now officially launched its Pre-IPO round, entering the final sprint before going public and accelerating its capitalization process across the board.

On the product side, Cloud Whale is also set to formally transition from home appliance cleaning to embodied cleaning. Its first home Embodied Artificial Intelligence product is currently in the pre-research phase, focused on one-click solutions for cleaning and organizing three-dimensional home spaces, enabling fully automated robot management that truly frees users' hands. The product is expected to launch within two years.

The robotic vacuum industry continues to show significant growth. In 2024, the domestic robotic vacuum market grew 40% year-over-year, with Q4 alone surging 76%. Overseas, North America, South Korea, and other markets have maintained steady development over the past three years with a compound annual growth rate of approximately 20%, while Germany's CAGR is around 10%. According to IDC and other forecasts, the global robotic vacuum market is expected to reach $11.2 billion in 2024.

From an overall competitive standpoint, the domestic robotic vacuum industry's top-tier structure has already solidified. Between 2022 and 2024, the combined market share of the top five brands consistently remained above 93% — extremely concentrated, making it difficult for newcomers to challenge the first tier. Overseas, by contrast, most foreign brands offer relatively singular product forms, mostly standalone units with single dust-collection technology, with limitations in product capability and functionality, putting their overall competitiveness at a disadvantage and clearly lacking growth momentum.

Against this backdrop, domestic manufacturers are actively expanding overseas, which could gradually push the global robotic vacuum market toward a more mature competitive structure.

Cloud Whale Xiaoyao Series (Source/Company)

Official data shows that in 2024, Cloud Whale's revenue grew over 130% year-over-year, with overseas markets surging nearly 700%. The company has also achieved stable profitability, ranking first in robotic vacuum market share during the Double Twelve shopping festival.

Different user groups show clear distinctions in functional preferences, price acceptance, and aesthetic preferences for cleaning appliances. Based on precise insights into these differentiated needs, Cloud Whale has built out a comprehensive product matrix to offer users richer choices.

In 2024, Cloud Whale launched 10 new products, doubling its new product count. Both robotic vacuums and floor washers now cover full price segments with clear positioning at each tier. Robotic vacuum revenue grew over 120% year-over-year, while floor washers surged over 500%.

Cloud Whale Floor Washer S3 Island (Source/Company)

Cloud Whale previously held significant advantages in DTC (Direct-to-Consumer) model operations, enabling rapid market entry in countries and regions with strong online channel development. However, last year's performance showed that Cloud Whale's offline expansion is also accelerating.

Cloud Whale has now completed offline presence in over 70 cities across more than 20 provinces nationwide, with over 500 authorized retail outlets, and has become a HarmonyOS Intelligent Connectivity partner. Overseas, Cloud Whale has entered more than 50 countries as the exclusive partner of a global home appliance leader, with presence in over 5,000 European retail stores. In North America, it has successfully entered nearly 300 offline stores through major KA channels including Best Buy and Costco.

Hard Kr has learned that in 2025, Cloud Whale expects to continue doubling its growth, with overseas markets projected to maintain 3-4x growth and overseas new product launches increasing 300% year-over-year. Domestically, offline brand store count will also double, with authorized retail outlets exceeding 1,000. Building on stable continued development in core markets including China, the United States, Canada, and South Korea, Cloud Whale will add over 70 new overseas markets, increasing investment in Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Israel, Australia, Poland, and others, establishing local functional teams for localized operations.

Cloud Whale at AWE 2025 (Source/Company)

The smart cleaning field is now intensely competitive, with the robotic vacuum market undergoing rapid consolidation. Lower-end products are gradually being eliminated, while user demand trends toward greater practicality, intelligence, and personalization — driving companies to accelerate their transition toward mid-to-high-end products and services. This manifests concretely in R&D and functionality through qualitative leaps in robots' perception, decision-making, and action capabilities enabled by Embodied Artificial Intelligence technology, allowing more precise understanding of user needs.

Since its founding, Cloud Whale has precisely anchored home robots as its core development direction. Robotic vacuums represent the highest shipment category in the consumer-facing robot sector and are currently the only autonomously mobile devices in homes, with environmental perception and intelligent planning capabilities, making them Cloud Whale's first product entry point into the embodied home device space.

After years of R&D and product accumulation, Cloud Whale has established technology blocks spanning AI binocular vision, robotic arms, human-machine interaction, and AI models, with its next robot product targeting home Embodied Artificial Intelligence.

Cloud Whale J5 Triple Laser (Source/Company)

Hard Kr has learned that Cloud Whale's home embodied product is personally led by founder Junbin Zhang. The first-generation embodied product features a self-developed mobile chassis carrying a self-developed robotic arm, with a built-in 3D binocular vision perception system that extends cleaning range from 2D planes to 3D spaces, while adding organization functionality. It enables one-click management of home cleaning and organizing needs, truly evolving from a home appliance into a comprehensive spatial cleaning steward.

Zhang notes that the home cleaning revolution stands at a historic inflection point. Current robotic vacuums on the market represent only the "iPod stage" of cleaning intelligence. Only home embodied intelligent agents with three-dimensional spatial cognition and autonomous decision-making capability hold the key to unlocking the industry's "iPhone moment."

"This isn't iteration of a single device, but a paradigm shift from functional tool to autonomous intelligent agent," Zhang said. "Future robotic vacuum products should be cleaning caretakers in users' homes — intelligent agents, not just cleaning tools. AI-driven intelligence will be the key growth driver for the industry's next phase."