Hivebotics' restroom-cleaning robot bet: US$6M Series A after 10,000 hours

Hivebotics builds Abluo, a mobile robot with an articulated arm that autonomously cleans commercial restrooms — toilets, urinals, sinks and floors — for malls, airports, hospitals and other facilities.

That a robot doing the dirty, full-room restroom job — not just floors — would be the wedge into autonomous facilities management, as wages rise and cleaning staff age.

US$6 million Series A (September 2026), led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India with Fareast Land Development (part of Taiwan's Farglory Group) and smart-restroom maker Rigel.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a cleaning-company operator told the founders his crews could not cope with restroom workloads. Convinced existing robots were useless in tight bathrooms, Rishab Patwari (computer engineering) and Nguyen Tuan Dung (mechanical engineering) spent days cleaning toilets and mixing solvents themselves. The pair built Hivebotics in 2021 as a spin-off from the National University of Singapore, developing it through NUS programs including the Innovation and Design Programme, the EDIC Entrepreneur Fellowship, NUS Overseas Colleges and the Graduate Research Innovation Programme.

Abluo launched commercially in 2024. Over its first 12 months it recorded nearly 10,000 operating hours across more than 20 sites in four regions — hospitals, airport terminals and shopping malls — cleaning to the same standard each cycle and replacing about 30 minutes of manual work with a five-minute human inspection. In September 2026 the company closed a US$6 million Series A led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India to fund volume production, expand its distributor network across four core markets and develop HiveIntelligence, its proprietary AI software layer.

Still running and scaling: as of September 2026 Hivebotics was moving Abluo from pilot deployments to volume production and expanding internationally, with a stated five-to-ten-year ambition of becoming an autonomous facilities-management provider running whole buildings from a remote command centre.

Hivebotics chose the most avoided chore — commercial restroom cleaning — and made full-room automation the product, where floor-only robots had left a visible gap.

The origin was grounded in a real operator's problem: a cleaning company unable to staff restrooms during COVID, which the founders validated by doing the work themselves.

Cleaning is non-discretionary spending, so demand is resilient even as labour shortages and wage floors push operators toward automation.

It raised a Series A on demonstrated product evidence — 10,000 operating hours across 20+ sites in four regions — rather than on pilots and promises.

Pick the task humans will not do — the dirtiest, least-staffable corner of a market — and automate the whole job, not the easy part; the product evidence then raises the money.

As of September 4, 2026, Hivebotics had closed its US$6 million Series A and was shifting Abluo from pilot deployments to volume production, widening its distributor network across four core markets and developing HiveIntelligence, its proprietary physical-AI software layer. The company's stated five-to-ten-year plan is to become an autonomous facilities-management provider: an ecosystem of integrated robots, including robots from other manufacturers, managing entire buildings from a remote command centre, with cleaning as the first pillar.