China's Pool Robot Industry Enters Shakeout as Startup CEO Offers Low Exit, Report Says

Feng’s company made its first overseas shipment of only a few hundred pool cleaners. Before launch, the team paid Facebook users to fill out surveys and built a machine designed to be 'smart': switching working modes by orientation, connecting to a mobile app for direction and scheduling. But returns exceeded 30 percent, while only about 3 percent of returned units actually malfunctioned. The culprit was the first 10 seconds after power-on: many users threw the machine into the pool before initialization ended, saw it drift or not move, and sent it back. After inspecting returns, Feng’s team found 60 to 70 percent were still resaleable, some never having touched water.

To fix the experience, the developers stripped away gesture recognition, mode switching and app control, leaving only 'turn it on and drop it in.' Feng suspended shipments for months and missed a sales season. Now he has stopped seeking large funding rounds, pulled out of Amazon in North America and shifted to ODM work, agency arrangements and gyroscope-module sales, aiming for tens of millions of yuan in revenue before seeking an acquisition.

The industry’s downturn is happening even while the market keeps growing. Industry data cited by Wangyuan in a Hong Kong listing application show that global pool-robot shipments rose from around 2.9 million units in 2020 to an estimated 4.9 million in 2025, with cordless models jumping from 200,000 units to 2.5 million units over the period. Wireless products grew from 6.6 percent to 51.5 percent of shipments. Retail market value climbed from about $1.394 billion to roughly $2.8 billion. There are about 34.1 million pools worldwide, and penetration is still below 30 percent.

Yet this growth attracted too many players. The older professional channel, built around Maytronics’ first Dolphin in 1983 and its successors, remains a closed circle of distributors who offer installation and repair. Chinese brands circumvented it by selling cordless robots on Amazon, where parameter lists—battery life, wall climbing, waterline cleaning, price—became the main pitch. But the same sales infrastructure also created a brutal game of returns and reviews. Returning to the traditional market later is expensive: Feng’s peer Zhao Gang, founder of a pool-equipment company, said 'anyone can make a single pool robot, but doing it well is another matter.' He has moved his supply chain, including motors and injection molding, in-house to compress lead times.

Aiper, known in Chinese as Yuanding, best illustrates the channel paradox. It rose on e-commerce and wireless products, then in April 2025 took a $100 million strategic investment from Spain’s Fluidra for 27 percent of the company, at a post-money valuation of about $370 million. The two-stage deal gives Fluidra a path to a controlling stake when Aiper’s revenue surpasses $370 million and EBITDA margin reaches about 15 percent. Aiper’s executives had found that pool dealers, who call themselves an 'old good boys club,' were hard to enter. The investment gave Aiper access to Fluidra’s global distribution. An Australian dealer later told Aiper’s Wang Yang: 'Aiper is now officially at the table.'

Wangyuan charts a different route. Founded by Fu Guilan in Tianjin after European customers asked whether China could build a pool cleaner, it spent years making OEM products for overseas brands. Its own-brand revenue rose from 254 million yuan in 2023 to 678 million yuan in 2025, lifting its share of total revenue from 67.1 percent to 83.5 percent, while OEM’s share fell from 31.1 percent to 15.6 percent, according to its listing application.

Views on where the industry is heading conflict. Some founders argue the war is over. 'Our road is still long—why do you say it’s over?' asks Zhou Tao, CTO of another pool-robot company. Shi Hang, a smart-hardware solution provider, said in the report that it is now hard for new entrants to reach the scale of Aiper—one million units and one to two billion yuan in annual revenue—and only two or three companies in the world can do so. Feng says investors in the niche have already finished their bets.