Narwal Founder & CEO Junbin Zhang Looks Back on 10 Years of Rethinking the Robot Vacuum

Narwal was founded in 2016 in Songshan Lake, Dongguan, China, and spent its first three years working on a single product: a robot vacuum and mop that could wash its own mop. That product, the Narwal T10, launched in 2019. This revolutionary product redefined robot vacuums with an industry-first base station plus dual water tanks design and a breakthrough automatic mopping function. It was named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2020 list. The T10 laid Narwal's business foundation, but more importantly, it created the self-cleaning robot mop category and established Narwal as a category definer.

Since then, Narwal has reinforced its leading position in the smart home cleaning space with multiple industry firsts, from modular auto water refill and drainage design and an AI dirt detection system to cyclonic anti-tangle roller brush and a real-time self-cleaning track mop.

The company now has more than 1,000 employees. Its products are sold in more than 30 countries and regions and have served more than 6 million households worldwide. According to IDC, Narwal shipped 1.7 million home cleaning robots in 2025, which ranked fifth worldwide.

As Narwal celebrates its 10th anniversary , Founder & CEO Junbin Zhang spoke with CGM, reflecting on the company's early challenges, its engineering-driven culture, and the future of home robotics - from perfecting hands-free floor cleaning to expanding into ideas about full-space intelligent cleaning.

Narwal is turning 10 this year. When you look back, what moment from those early startup days stands out the most to you?

Junbin Zhang:We had spent three years developing a single product with no revenue to show for. At the time, the market wasn't convinced that robot mopping could become a meaningful category. Investors were skeptical, manufacturers were reluctant to take on such a technically complex product with such small initial orders, and our team worked with very limited resources. Many of us spent long days on-site, working through one technical challenge after another.

Then the T10 went on sale in China, and on its first official day, it generated over $1.4 million in sales.

I still remember what that moment meant to us. It wasn't just about the sales. It was the first real validation that what we had spent three years building could make a meaningful difference in people's lives. We believed families deserved a truly hands-free mopping experience, even when the market wasn't ready to believe in it yet.

You spent years building the first self-cleaning robot mop from scratch. What made you confident this was the right direction when no one else in the industry was doing it?

Junbin Zhang:That confidence came directly from my own home. Ten years ago, when I was talking with my family, my mother asked a simple question: What if we had a robot that could wash its own mop and truly free our hands? That everyday frustration was all the validation I needed.

Back then, the entire industry was stuck in a loop-every robot vacuum was just a standard round puck with no base station and no water management, completely ignoring the chore people hated most: hand-washing dirty mop pads. While the rest of the market hesitated, I knew that if we could solve the question of what it would take for someone never to touch a mop again, we weren't just building a feature-we were solving the ultimate pain point.

Turning that conviction into reality took relentless engineering. We pushed through over 30 technical approaches and more than 200 iterations of the mop design alone. Because the robot needed to constantly return to the base station to wash its pads, standard navigation wasn't enough; it required a massive leap in positioning accuracy. Our team spent nearly two years perfecting that precise positioning logic and return-to-wash path to ensure the system actually worked in the real world.

Narwal has introduced a lot of "industry firsts" over the years. Which innovation are you personally most proud of, and why?

Junbin Zhang:The one I'm proudest of is probably the anti-tangle roller brush we introduced in 2023 on the Freo X Ultra, our DualFlow Tangle-Free System. Hair wrapping around the roller had plagued robot vacuums for more than 20 years, along with the chore of cutting tangled hair off the brush by hand. We redesigned it around cyclonic airflow that guides hair toward the dustbin instead of letting it wrap, and the design earned certification from both SGS and TÜV.

What makes me proud isn't only that it was a technical first. It's an innovation people can actually feel. That's how I think about innovation: start from a real pain point in people's homes, and build something users notice right away. It's also one of our best-selling products worldwide today, which tells me people noticed. This user-first approach to innovation also underpins Narwal's evolution in mopping technology - and paved the way for another industry first: the Flow series and its real-time on-board self-cleaning mop system.

The Flow series brought real-time self-cleaning to robot mops. What inspired that idea, and how did users react?

Junbin Zhang:It really came down to what actually happens in the middle of a cleaning run. If the mop gets dirty in the kitchen, it drags that dirt into the living room. The only workaround was programming the robot to constantly return to the base station to wash, which completely defeats the purpose of a fast, efficient cleaning cycle.

To fix this, we added a washing system to the robot. We wanted to solve that problem differently, by bringing continuous mop washing directly onto the robot. With the Flow, launched in 2025, we introduced a system that continuously rinses the mop with warm water as it cleans, helping keep a clean mopping surface in contact with your floors. With the Flow 2, we took that a step further, using hot water up to 140°F to enhance the cleaning experience.

The user reaction proved this was exactly the upgrade the market was waiting for. When we launched the Flow 2, it hit No. 1 among new robot vacuums on Amazon US in under 24 hours. U.S sales surged 305% over the previous generation, and our European launch saw 241% growth. It validated exactly what we suspected: people don't just want automated mopping. They want a truly clean automated mopping.

Your team includes engineers from places like DJI, HUAWEI, and Microsoft. How does that level of talent shape the products Narwal creates?

Junbin Zhang:A robot vacuum is really three problems in one box: navigation, hardware, and software. People from DJI, HUAWEI, and Microsoft have solved versions of those problems at scale, and they bring that experience. We have more than 700 people in R&D now, over 40% of the company.

Narwal operates an integrated product development and manufacturing model spanning R&D, design, manufacturingand delivery, supported by its Shenzhen R&D and Dongguan manufacturing footprint. This depth of talent enables Narwal to maintain a full-chain development model, with oversight from the earliest product concept through final manufacturing.

Narwal now serves over six million households worldwide. What do you think has helped the brand connect with users across so many different countries?

Junbin Zhang:We refuse to sell a one-size-fits-all robot across different regions; we customize products and operations to local needs. Take the U.S. as an example: American homes are bigger, with more carpet and more pets. To solve that, our U.S. models feature expanded battery capacity improved route planning, a dedicated deep-cleaning carpet mode, and a specialized brush optimized for pet hair. People can immediately tell when a product was genuinely designed for a home like theirs.

Narwal is now top-5 globally in robot vacuum shipments. What's the next big milestone you're aiming for?

Junbin Zhang:Honestly, a ranking is a result, not the goal. Our next major milestone is to push robot vacuums across the threshold from a niche tech novelty to a genuine household essential, just like refrigerators or washing machines.

We are focused on two priorities to get there: first, we will keep refining the reliability and accessibility of floor cleaning to deliver a truly hands-free experience for every household. Second, we will steadily expand beyond flat floor cleaning into 3D spatial cleaning and organization, building on our expertise in perception and navigation. We are also continuing to deepen our global footprint and localization capabilities to bring this experience to more households around the world.

Narwal has always focused on user experience instead of chasing specs or price wars. Why is that approach so important to you?

Junbin Zhang:Nobody ever walked into their house and said, "Wow, look at that suction number." Specs look good in ads, but they are meaningless to the average consumer. People just want clean floors without babysitting a machine.

As for price wars, they inevitably eat into your R&D and degrade your quality until customers stop trusting you. We'd rather focus on original breakthroughs that offer real-world value. We get the user experience right first, and then bring costs down by optimizing our own supply chain. For us, real long-term growth never comes from price cutting - it comes from building products that truly solve problems for users. That's the only way the category can grow beyond a niche tech gadget and become a true household staple.

You've said robot vacuums are still in their "iPod stage." What do you think the next big leap in home robotics will look like?

Junbin Zhang:The iPod was a great product, but it only did one thing. Robot vacuums are exactly like that today. They're great at navigating flat floors, but they still can't fully address the diverse, three-dimensional cleaning needs in real-world homes.

I see the future in two distinct phases. First, floor cleaning has to become so reliable and affordable that it's just a normal daily household necessity. Second, we evolve from flat-floor cleaning tools into full-space cleaning assistants with 3D cleaning or organizing capability.

But before we move on to the second stage, there's still significant room for improvement right now as consumers' expectations for home cleaning continue to grow.

Robot vacuums still have relatively low household penetration compared to appliances like washing machines. What needs to change for them to become a true everyday essential?

Junbin Zhang:Right now, about 8% of homes in China have one, and around 15% in mature overseas markets. Compare that to washing machines, which sit above 90%; robot vacuums have a long way to go. Many people bought an early robot vacuum and still ended up mopping by hand afterward. As long as that keeps happening. it stays a gadget.

To become a true household essential, a robot has to clean without help, last for years, and be priced for an average family. Once those conditions are met, it stops being optional. At Narwal, our roadmap is entirely focused on crossing that threshold. We are perfecting the autonomous cleaning experience while driving down costs, pushing the category until robot vacuums are viewed as an indispensable appliance in every home.

What does Narwal's 10th anniversary mean to you personally?

Junbin Zhang:Mostly, it is a humbling reminder of how close we came to not making it at all. We started out as a small team in Songshan Lake that the industry barely took seriously. Today, we are a company of over 1,000 people serving over six million homes globally. But what I'm most proud of isn't scale. It's the fact that our DNA hasn't changed. We still build products the way we did on day one: by looking at a real problem a family is facing and building a solution for it. That is the exact philosophy I want to carry into our next decade.

If you could describe Narwal's next decade in one sentence, what would it be?

Junbin Zhang:Over the next decade, we want to build on our roots as pioneers of automated floor cleaning and expand our expertise into more comprehensive floor care and intelligent home cleaning. Ultimately, our ambition is to develop technology that better adapts to the way people live and gives them more time for what they love.