Finance
China’s robot vacuum Roborock plans mass-market cleaners with AI arms
In 2025, Roborock launched a vacuum cleaner with a robotic arm for moving socks and other obstructions out of the way.
Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images
BEIJING — Household robots for cleaning are about to quickly become an affordable reality.
At least that’s what Quan Gang, president of Beijing-based robot vacuum cleaner company Roborock, has in mind as he strategizes for the next five years. The company ranks first among smart vacuums by global market share, according to IDC Research. Last week, it reported a nearly 79% revenue surge in the first half of this year. About half of sales came from outside China.
In an exclusive interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Quan predicted that human-like robots will become part of many households by 2030, thanks largely to advances in generative artificial intelligence.
And before then, he expects, Roborock can make its latest, high-end cleaner with an AI-powered robotic arm so cheap that the mass market will be able to buy it — for at most a few hundred U.S. dollars.
“If we only focus on the premium segment, in the end, other than being the best robotic vacuum cleaner company in the world, we will have nothing,” Quan said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. He noted that robot vacuums still don’t have a very high household penetration rate.
China, the largest market for the robot vacuums by value, has a penetration rate of only 5.6%, while the United States, the second-largest market, has a 22% penetration rate, according to Euromonitor estimates for 2025. The firm predicts penetration in the U.S. will tick up to 24.1% over the next two years, and edge down to 5.5% in China.
Competition in the robotic vacuum + robotic arm category heated up earlier this year at the U.S. Consumer Electronics Show, with Roborock and at least two other Chinese competitors releasing demos. The AI-powered arm removes obstacles from the cleaner’s path as it rolls autonomously around the house.
So far, only Roborock has started selling one, called the Saros Z70 — but with a hefty price tag of around $2,600 on amazon.com. The site shows 141 reviews and a 4.6 rating. Roborock did not share specific sales figures.
Initial reviews of the Saros Z70 from U.S. tech sites such as Mashable and Wired weren’t impressed, especially given the price, but hoped for more capable versions in the near future. Both recommended that consumers stick with the more traditional Roborock Saros 10R — which retails for $1,600.
Robot vacuum cleaner companies should develop products that “bridge cutting-edge technologies and mainstream price points to accelerate adoption,” said Jin Liu, senior analyst of small appliances at Euromonitor International.
But even if the price comes down, it would only be a small step toward having a robot help with cooking and other household chores.
Vacuum cleaners are the “only successful application [of robots] in our homes to date,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3). “This is after four decades of talking about how we’re going to have robots in our home.”
“What made the [robot] vacuum cleaner so successful is it didn’t cost that much,” he said. For the same thing to happen for humanoids to enter homes, he said, there needs to be a compelling quality for the price.
Humanoids, such as those from Chinese startup Unitree, still cost tens of thousands of U.S. dollars and don’t have clear household use cases yet.
Navigating tariffs
Despite its mass market ambitions, Roborock said that because of tariffs, it had to raise the Saros Z70 price by $700 from the original $1,899.
Quan said Roborock started working with suppliers late last year in Vietnam, where he said the company can fulfill all its North American orders.
Looking ahead, he said the company is considering global supply chain partnerships, but not necessarily to invest in building its own factories. Roborock’s plans for a Hong Kong listing are primarily to raise capital for international expansion, Quan said, noting the company is also expanding beyond vacuums.
Despite Roborock’s 79% revenue surge, the company more than doubled its spending, largely on research and development, steepening the company’s losses in the first half of the year.
Quan said the company has hired nearly 100 AI experts this year and is still hiring — with an eye to add a total of nearly 200 AI experts this year. He said many of the new hires have overseas education or work experience.
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The company built a dedicated AI lab in Shanghai and a research institute in Shenzhen, soon after Roborock’s founding in 2014. When asked about computing power, Quan said there are many solutions and that buying Nvidia chips aren’t the only option.
As for improving the AI-powered robotic arm and making it cheaper, “the challenge lies primarily with the algorithm and data,” he said, not the hardware.
Humanoid apps
As AI becomes more critical for household robots, Quan has an even bigger vision.
“If this robot in your home needs to clean, then it will have to integrate the cleaning knowledge that Roborock has accumulated over the years in algorithms, models, data and training,” he said. “Then it can be installed onto the robot like an app.”
“This robot may be Tesla’s, or Unitree’s, or someone else’s, … but in the area of cleaning, it will be inseparable from Roborock,” he said, claiming the company has the best data on cleaning tasks. Another company might have the best data for robots to cook, he said.
The humanoid market will likely reach $5 trillion by 2050, with $800 billion in China alone, according to Morgan Stanley estimates.
“With humanoids, if they can’t do more than one thing, then they’re competing against an existing form factor that can do one thing very well,” Burnstein said. But ne noted companies around the world expect there’s a big market for safe, affordable humanoids that can cook, clean, help the elderly and do other things.
“We’re not there yet with the technology, but maybe we’ll get there and maybe that multitasking would be the differentiator potentially,” he said. “So you wouldn’t need 5 robots. You might just need one.”
Cybersecurity and enterprise software stocks have been market dogs in 2026, with fears that AI will wipe out a wide range of companies in the enterprise space dominating the narrative. But they snapped a brutal losing streak this past week, joining in the broader market rally that saw all losses from the U.S.-Iran war regained by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500.
Cybersecurity has been “a victim of some of the AI-related headlines,” Christian Magoon, Amplify ETFs CEO, said on this week’s “ETF Edge.”
It wasn’t just niche cybersecurity names. Take Microsoft, for example, which was recently down close to 20% for the year. Its shares surged last week by 13%.
A big driver of the pummeling in software stocks was a rotation within tech by investors to AI infrastructure and semiconductors and some other names in large-cap tech, Magoon said, and since cybersecurity stocks and ETFs are heavily weighted towards software companies, they were left behind even as those businesses continue to grow on a fundamental basis.
But Wall Street now has become more bullish with the stocks at lower levels. Brent Thill, Jefferies tech analyst, said last week that the worst may be over for software stocks. “I think that this concept that software is dead, and then Anthropic and OpenAI are going to kill the entire industry, is just over-exaggerated,” he said on CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Wednesday.
“Big Short” investor Michael Burry wrote in a Substack post on Wednesday that he is becoming bullish about software stocks after the recent selloff. “Software stocks remain interesting because of accelerated extreme declines last week arising from a reflexive positive feedback loop between falling software stocks and changes in the market for their bank debt,” he wrote.
The Global X Cybersecurity ETF (BUG), is down about 12% since the beginning of the year, with top holdings including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Akamai Technologies and CrowdStrike. But BUG was up 12% last week. The First Trust NASDAQ Cybersecurity ETF (CIBR) is down 6% for the year, but up 9% in the past week.
Piper Sandler analyst Rob Owens reiterated an “overweight” rating on Palo Alto Networks which helped the stock pop 7% — it is now down roughly 6% on the year. Its peers saw similar moves, including CrowdStrike.
Performance of Global X cybersecurity ETF versus S&P 500 over past one-year period.
Magoon said expectations may have become too high in cybersecurity, and with a crowding effect among investors, solid results were not enough to to push stocks higher. But the down-and-then-back-up 2026 for the sector is also a reminder that when stocks fall sharply in a short period of time, opportunity may knock.
“Once you’re down over 10% in some of these subsectors, you start to see the contrarians start to say, ‘well, maybe I’ll take a look at this,'” Magoon said.
He said AI does add both opportunity and uncertainty to the cybersecurity equation, increasing demand but also introducing new competition. But he added, “I think the dip is good to buy in an AI-driven world,” specifically because the risks to companies may lead to more M&A in cyber names that benefits the stocks.
For now, investors may look for opportunity on the margins rather than rush back into beaten-up tech names. “I think investors are still going to remain underweight software,” Thill said.
But Magoon advises investors to at least take the reminder to keep an eye on niches in the market during pronounced downturns. “The best-performing are often the least bought and do the best over the next 12 months versus late-in-the-game piling on,” he said.
While that may have been a mindset that worked against the last investors into cybersecurity and enterprise software in mid-2025 when the negative sentiment started building, at least for now, it’s started working for the stocks in the sector again.
Meanwhile, this year’s biggest winner is also a good example of what can be an extended trade in either a bullish or bearish direction. Last year, institutional ownership of energy was at multi-year lows, Magoon said, referencing Bank of America data. “Reverse sentiment can be a great indicator,” he said.
But he cautioned that any selective buying of stocks that have dipped does have to contend with the risk that there is a potentially bigger drawdown in the market yet to come in 2026. That is because midterm election years historically have been marked by large drawdowns. “If you think it is bad right now, it could get a lot worse,” Magoon said. But he added that there’s a silver-lining in that data, too, for the patient investor. The market has posted very strong 12-month returns after midterm election drawdowns end. So, for investors with a longer-term time horizon and no need for short-term liquidity, Magoon said, “stick in there.”
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New innovation in the exchange-traded fund industry could come at a cost to investors during extreme conditions.
According to MFS Investment Management’s Jamie Harrison, ETFs involved in increasingly complex derivatives and less transparent markets may be in uncharted territory when it comes to violent downturns.
“Those would be something that you’d want to keep an eye on as volatility ramps up,” the firm’s head of ETF capital markets told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “As innovation continues to increase at a rapid pace within the ETF wrapper, [it’s] definitely something that we advise our clients to be really front-footed about… Lack of transparency could absolutely be an issue if we’re going to start seeing some deep sell-offs.”
His firm has been around since 1924 and is known for inventing the open-end mutual fund. Last year, ETF.com named MFS Investment Management as the best new ETF issuer.
“It’s important to do due diligence on the portfolio,” he said. “Having a firm that has deep partnerships, deep bench of subject matter experts that plays with the A-team in terms of the Street and liquidity providers available [are] super important.”
Liquidity as the real issue?
Harrison suggested the real issue is liquidity, particularly during a steep sell-off.
“We’ve all seen the news and the headlines around potential private credit ETFs. That picture becomes much more murky,” he added. “It’s up to advisors, to investors [and] to clients to really dig in and look under the hood and engage with their issuers.”
He noted investors will have to ask some tough questions.
“What does this look like in a 20% drawdown? How does this liquidity facility work? Am I going to be able to get in? Am I going to be able to get out? And if I’m able to get out, am I able to get out at a price that’s tight to NAV [net asset value], and what’s the infrastructure at your shop in terms of managing that consideration for me,” said Harrison.
Amplify ETFs’ Christian Magoon is also concerned about these newer ETF strategies could weather a monster drawdown. He listed private credit as a red flag.
“If your ETF owns private credit, I think it’s worth taking a look at, kind of what the standards are around liquidity and how that ETF is trading, because that should be a bit of a mismatch between the trading pace of ETFs and the underlying asset,” the firm’s CEO said in the same interview.
Magoon also highlighted potential issues surrounding equity-linked notes. The notes provide fixed income security while offering potentially higher returns linked to stocks or equity indexes.
“Those could potentially be in stress due to redemptions and the underlying credit risk. That’s another kind of unique derivative,” Magoon said. “I would very closely look at any ETF that has equity-linked notes should we get into a major drawdown or there be a contagion in private credit or something related to the banking system.”
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