World's First Smart Mopping Robot 'Cloud Whale' Announces Close to 100 Million Yuan Series B Funding Led by Source Code Capital and ByteDance

源码资本·April 2, 2020·0·5

The World's First Smart Mopping Robot

Cloud Whale recently announced the completion of a nearly RMB 100 million Series B funding round, led by Source Code Capital and ByteDance, with follow-on investment from existing shareholders including Infore Capital and Dami Ventures. Scheme Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor.

Founded in 2016, Cloud Whale is an innovative company rooted in the cleaning robot space, dedicated to developing one-touch home service robots. As modern life accelerates, more and more households are delegating cleaning tasks to robots. Yet most robotic vacuums on the market only handle dust — their mopping performance falls short. The typical approach of attaching a cloth pad to the body merely skims over stains without effectively removing them. Poor mopping results and the need for manual cloth washing are consumers' top complaints, meaning these devices haven't truly freed users' hands. Intelligent mopping has become a genuine necessity.

Narwal Fully Automatic Smart Mopping Robot: Base Station + Robot

Addressing these pain points, Cloud Whale developed the world's first fully automatic smart mopping robot. With its solid capabilities in intelligent sweeping and mopping, Narwal surpassed $1 million in overseas crowdfunding and was named one of CES 2019's best products by authoritative international tech media. It also won the European Plus X Award, Edison Awards Gold Medal, EIA Gold Award, CES Innovation Award, German Red Dot Design Award, and German Innovation Award. During its 2019 Double Eleven debut, sales exceeded RMB 10 million within three hours, and it has since become a Tmall bestseller.

Narwal Fully Automatic Smart Mopping Robot at work

The Narwal achieves human-hand-like mopping with true "sweep-and-mop integration": an innovative physical pressure mechanism applies 10N of force to the floor, combined with patented dual-cloth rotation at 180 rpm, enabling the robot to execute wetting, pressing, pushing, and wiping in one fluid motion — easily removing stubborn stains. Its "base station + robot" intelligent cleaning system delivers genuine automation and hands-free operation: the mopping robot intelligently determines when to return to the base station for cloth washing based on cleaning duration and area. After automatic washing, it resumes cleaning from where it left off, ensuring the cloth stays clean and preventing secondary contamination. Once the task is complete, the robot automatically returns to the base station for washing, air-drying, storage, and charging — bringing effortless cleaning convenience to consumers' homes.

Since its founding, Cloud Whale has grown to a team of over 200 people from leading universities and companies. The company possesses full-stack capabilities spanning manufacturing, supply chain, R&D, sales, quality, branding, and organizational management. After three years of development, Narwal has achieved technical breakthroughs while filing over 100 patent applications, and has formed strategic partnerships with multiple top-tier law firms to build a robust intellectual property protection barrier. Following this funding round, Cloud Whale will increase investment in new product development, applying extreme product thinking to continuously create more humanized and intelligent home cleaning robots.