A Brief History of Roborock

Roborock is an intelligent hardware manufacturer focusing on technological innovation. Its core technicians are technical experts with years of research and development experience from Microsoft, Huawei, Intel, ARM and Nokia. In this article, I wish to tell you the basic history of Roborock.

1.Xiaomi OEM started

Roborock was established in 2014, and it was a Xiaomi OEM in the early stage. In September 2016, the company commercialized the lidar navigation technology to the robotic vacuum cleaner on a large scale, launched the first product, and sold it through the Xiaomi ecological chain customization mode.

With the expansion of sales scale, since 2017, the company has begun to transform from an agency to a private brand sales road. At the same time, it has developed the U.S. and European markets simultaneously through overseas channels such as Amazon.

Xiaomi logo

2.Rapid development of independent brands

At the beginning of its development, the biggest difference between Roborock and Chinese competitors was that the company focused on technology and algorithm, and solved the pain point of “difficult to use” products. Not only has it achieved industry leadership in the core fields of robot vacuum cleaner such as laser radar scanning and ranging, artificial intelligence technology, etc., but also it can carry the more advanced basic functions on each type of vacuum cleaner at that time. By the end of 2021, the company had applied for 332 invention patents and owned 42 software copyrights.

Roborock logo

3.There is still a long way to go

In fact, the gross profit rate of Roborock which is separated from Xiaomi, is expected to rise all the way, but this also means that the channels, brands, supply chains and other links that were originally obtained by relying on Xiaomi’s ecological chain need to be rebuilt. As a result, the high marketing cost has squeezed the R&D cost.

4.To sum up

The rapid rise is closely related to its own product strength, and the value of Xiaomi in it is beyond doubt. At present, the industry competition is becoming increasingly fierce. While the sales cost continues to increase. Roborock is losing its strength in the field of technology research and development. It may be necessary return to the original intention to go further.


techTongBo (also named: Nanjing TongBo / NJTB) is a Chinese company specializing in the manufacture and sales of vacuum cleaner accessories. We offer replacement accessories for the global market that are compatible with mainstream vacuum cleaner brands and have stronger price advantages.

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