08 September 2026 | News
Image Courtesy: Public Domain
Hivebotics, a Singapore-based robotics company, has closed a US$6 million Series A led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India. Fareast Land Development (Farglory Group) and Rigel, a leading Asian manufacturer of eco-friendly, smart restroom products, also participated in the round.
The capital will take Hivebotics’ robot, Abluo, from pilot deployments into volume production. Abluo is a mobile robot with an articulated arm that cleans a commercial restroom end to end, covering toilets, urinals, sinks and floors, rather than the floor alone as existing cleaning robots do. The round also funds expansion of the distributor network across the company’s four core markets and further development of HiveIntelligence, the proprietary physical AI layer that plans, monitors and validates every cleaning job.
Abluo has logged nearly 10,000 operating hours over 12 months of use across more than 20 sites in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, including hospitals, airport terminals and shopping malls. Restroom cleaning is hard to staff and harder to keep consistent. Abluo cleans restrooms to the same standard every cycle, replacing around 30 minutes of manual work with a five-minute human inspection.
Commenting on the fundraise, Rishab Patwari, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hivebotics, said, “Within three years, teams of robots will do most of the repetitive, labour-intensive work of running a facility. We started with restrooms because they are the hardest: wet, cramped, and full of moving parts. Solve that, and the rest of the building follows. The timing is right. Labour is scarce, physical AI is breaking through, and hardware is getting cheap. Robots are no longer productivity tools. They are essential services.”
Chan Yip Pang, Executive Director, Investment, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, said, “Restroom cleaning is one of the few labour markets where demand is non-discretionary and supply keeps tightening. In Hivebotics’ key markets, the cleaning workforce is ageing and wage floors are rising, so operators need a way to hold hygiene standards without adding headcount they cannot find. Hivebotics is one of the few companies globally solving that specific problem end to end. We are backing the team to take that from Singapore into various regions.”
Soft facilities management, covering cleaning, security, catering and related services, was estimated at US$770 billion globally in 2024 and is projected to reach US$1.23 trillion by 2033, according to Grand View Research. Restroom cleaning is its most labour-intensive line. The work is also the hardest to staff, with Kimberly-Clark reporting janitorial turnover of 200 to 400 per cent annually.
Abluo cleans without contact. Instead of brushes or cloths, which carry cross-contamination risk between cubicles, it combines high-pressure steam, a targeted chemical jet, vacuum extraction and a blow-drying stage, with an arm that reaches under rims and around fixtures. Onboard vision identifies each fixture, a proprietary AI pipeline generates the cleaning route in real time, and every job ends with a scored before-and-after check, so cleaning outcomes can be audited rather than assumed.
Hivebotics was founded in 2021 out of the National University of Singapore by Rishab Patwari and Nguyen Tuan Dung. Vincent Sim, formerly head of Kärcher’s Singapore business, joined as Chief Sales Officer in 2025.
