Hivebotics 的厕所清洁机器人赌注：在累计 10,000 小时运营后获得 600 万美元 A 轮融资

做的是什么生意

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.

启动资金：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.

起因

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.

经过

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.

结果

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.

可借鉴之处

选择人类不愿做的任务——市场中最脏、最难招人的部分——并自动化整个工作，而不是只做容易的部分；产品和数据自然会带来资金。