Editor’s note: This article is republished from Jumpstart, a TechNode Group publication.
The brands competing to clean the world’s floors have something less visible in common. According to Amicro, eight of the world’s ten leading smart cleaning robot companies have used its solutions.
The Zhuhai-based company lists Xiaomi, iRobot, Ecovacs, Philips, SEB and Anker among its well-known end customers. Consumers recognise those names on the finished machines. Amicro’s work sits inside: chips, algorithms and supporting components that help robots locate themselves, understand their surroundings and move through them.
It is a substantial position for a company that began with a more specific task—making robot vacuums navigate better. Over the following decade, its work expanded with the machines it served, from motion control and mapping to visual perception and combinations of sensors.
Now Amicro is offering shares in Hong Kong, with trading expected to begin on November 12. The IPO comes as it seeks a wider role in robotics, carrying experience accumulated on household floors into machines operating in more varied environments.
Finding a Market for a Chip
Amicro was established in Hengqin, Zhuhai, in 2014 under the name Amicro Semiconductor. Jiang Xinqiao, a co-founder who now chairs and leads the company, came to the business with a background in semiconductors.
In a 2020 interview, Jiang recalled considering where a young chip company could establish itself. Consumer electronics was competitive, while industrial chips involved long development and adoption cycles. Robot vacuums offered a different combination: a consumer product with the potential for volume, but also a technically demanding environment.
A home is an awkward place for a machine to navigate. Furniture interrupts routes. Rooms connect through narrow openings. A useful cleaner must cover an area systematically and find its way back, rather than repeatedly wander over the same patch of floor.
Amicro approached that problem through system-on-chip design, combining functions that would otherwise require more components and integration work. Its early development centred on motion control and simultaneous localisation and mapping, or SLAM—the process through which a robot builds a map while working out its own position within it.
The company completed the tape-out of its AM380S chip in December 2016, with mass-production applications in cleaning robots following in June 2017. Its AM680 followed in 2018, extending the product line into visual navigation.
Those steps gave Amicro a way to participate in the growth of robot vacuums without building a competing appliance brand. Its customers could develop and sell the finished machines while drawing on a specialist supplier for part of the technology underneath.
Growing With the Machine
As robot cleaners became more capable, the work required of their navigation systems expanded.
Tracking movement helps a machine estimate where it has travelled. Cameras and laser sensors provide additional information about the space around it. Combining those inputs can help a robot build a more useful picture of its environment and decide how to move through it.
For a supplier such as Amicro, each addition creates work across both hardware and software. A sensor must produce information the processor can handle. Algorithms must interpret it within the machine’s computing and power limits. The resulting instructions must translate into reliable movement.
This helps explain the shape of Amicro’s business today. Alongside its processors and algorithms, it provides sensor-related components, motion-control modules, software development kits and tools that customers can combine for different products.
The commercial value lies in making those parts work together. A manufacturer developing a new cleaner needs to move from a desired feature—better navigation or obstacle avoidance, for example—to a design that can be tested, manufactured and supported. Amicro sells into that development process.
Its catalogue consequently reflects years of work on practical robot behaviour: mapping rooms, planning coverage, detecting drops, returning to charge and dealing with obstacles. These are small actions from the user’s perspective. Repeated across different homes and machines, they become a substantial engineering task.
A Business Behind Competing Brands
That accumulated work has brought Amicro into a broad set of supply chains.
The company disclosed sales of more than 3.5 million intelligent mobile robot solutions in 2025. Its products have reached markets in Asia, Europe and the Americas through the businesses that incorporate them.
The relationship with those businesses can take several forms. Amicro supplies technology that may reach a finished robot through a distributor or system integrator as well as through direct cooperation. Its role can therefore be much less visible than the brand on the appliance.
Serving different manufacturers also requires flexibility. A component suitable for an entry-level cleaner may be only one part of what a more sophisticated machine needs. Customers have their own product designs, cost targets and software requirements. Amicro’s approach allows them to select combinations of its technology rather than adopt an identical finished robot.
This is what gives the “eight of ten” figure its significance. It places Amicro within an industry whose consumer-facing brands compete intensely, while some of their underlying development needs overlap.
The business has grown, though profitability remains unfinished work. Amicro reported revenue of approximately RMB407 million in 2025, alongside a net loss of RMB155 million. Research continued to absorb substantial resources as the company developed more advanced products.
That spending now supports an ambition extending beyond the category that established the company.
Looking Beyond the Floor
In August 2025, Amicro introduced the AM970 multi-camera vision platform at an event that also marked its change of branding from Amicro Semiconductor to Amicro Technology.
The product offers a concrete expression of that broader identity. It supports inputs from up to six image sensors and combines visual processing with computing resources for AI workloads. The company presented applications ranging from cleaning robots and lawn mowers to drones, industrial vision and humanoid robots.
The connection with its earlier business is clear. A machine moving through a home, a garden or a commercial building needs to sense its surroundings and translate that information into action. Amicro has spent years developing parts of that process.
Each new environment also brings additional demands. Outdoor lighting changes, terrain is less predictable, and the objects a machine encounters differ from those on a living-room floor. The opportunity is to reuse accumulated technology while extending it to meet those requirements.
Amicro’s work with the University of Macau provides another strand of that development. A profile from the Macau International Technology Industry Centre describes joint research involving robotics and home-service applications. Its ambitions have been developing through product engineering and research partnerships alongside its established commercial business.
The Hong Kong IPO would fund the next stage. Amicro plans to direct about 70% of net proceeds towards strengthening its hardware, software and robot-specific AI chips. The offering thus connects its existing position in mobile robotics with the capabilities it wants to build next.
Amicro grew by helping other companies make robots that could find their way around a home. Today, its technology reaches consumers through brands far better known than its own. Its next chapter will depend on how much of that experience it can carry beyond cleaning—and how many more tasks customers will trust it to help their machines perform.