The Robots Already in the House

The robots people actually live with are not the humanoids of the headlines; they are the quiet discs cleaning the floor, and China owns them. In 2024 Roborock became the world’s number-one robot-vacuum brand by both units and revenue, and four of the global top five, Roborock, Ecovacs, Xiaomi and Dreame, were Chinese.^[1][2] The only non-Chinese name in the top tier, America’s iRobot, which invented the category with the Roomba, saw its shipments fall.^[2]

The market they lead is substantial: about 20.6 million robot vacuums sold in 2024, worth $9.3 billion.^[2] By early 2025 the four Chinese brands together held roughly 54% of it, and the story is not cheap-and-cheerful; Dreame’s average selling price topped $650, with most of its sales overseas.^[3]

America invented the robot vacuum with the Roomba. China took the category, the premium tier, and the lead — and is now doing the same to the lawn.

The next patch: lawns and pools

Having won indoors, the same firms are moving outside. Robotic lawn mowers are an early, fast-growing market, about 384,000 units in 2024, still under 2% of a lawn-care market that could theoretically be worth tens of billions, and Chinese names Segway-Navimow, Mammotion, Dreame and Ecovacs are among the leaders.^[4] In premium pool-cleaning robots, the startup Beatbot took an 85% share of China’s high-end online market in its first year.^[4]

One honest caveat: the lawn and pool figures come from industry and company reporting rather than an audited tracker, so they are best read as directional. The robot-vacuum leadership, drawn from IDC data, is on firmer ground.

Why it matters for investors

Home robotics is China’s consumer-robotics beachhead, and it is instructive precisely because it is unglamorous. These are real robots, navigation, computer vision, autonomy, sold profitably at scale into millions of homes, which is more than most humanoid ventures can claim. The investable pattern is a repeatable one: win a category indoors, climb to the premium tier, then export the same navigation-and-autonomy stack into the next domestic chore. We watch the move from vacuums to lawns to pools as a live demonstration of Chinese firms compounding a consumer-robotics platform; while the West debates robots that walk, China is quietly selling the ones that clean.