AIBRIEF
A cordless pool robot parked on the dock after a full cycle, with grit near the steps and a ring on the waterline, is now the spec sheet vendors have to clear. The gap between "finished a cycle" and "actually cleaned the pool" is the category's next problem, according to Hua.
In a Leiphone interview, Liu called the current pool-robot market a "wireless-driven stock market" whose battery and suction dividend is nearly spent. The real contest, he said, is just starting on underwater perception, where the core bottleneck is not hardware but signal availability through refraction, scatter, turbidity, and bubbles.
Wave Future's X10 fuses LiDAR, ultrasonic, and vision; per the company's own internal testing, it maps roughly 100% of regular pools and 95%+ on irregular structures, with the A10 hitting 98% edge coverage. Liu warned that bolting on good hardware does not equal product leadership, noting outcome depends on perception, algorithm, motion control, and cleaning-system coordination.
The Shenzhen-based company raised a tens-of-millions-of-RMB angel round in January 2025 led by Zhuichuang Chuangtou, then a roughly hundred-million-RMB Pre-A in November 2025. Founded in 2024, it has shipped 20,000+ units in H1 2025, with 90%+ of revenue from overseas through Lowe's, Bauhaus, Best Buy, and Home Depot.
Per 36kr citing China Insights Consultancy, global pools reached roughly 32.9 million in 2024, with robot penetration moving from 17.8% (2019) to 26.2% (2024) and a projected 34.2% by 2029. The race Liu describes is a single CTO's framing, and Wave Future's coverage numbers are vendor-internal. What to watch: whether the next product cycle puts perception, irregular-pool mapping, and edge cleaning on the spec sheet, not just battery and suction.