Airseekers, a Chinese yard robotics company, has raised an eight-figure RMB sum following the completion of a Series A+ funding round. The round was led by Infore Environment Technology Group, a listed company affiliated with Midea. Existing investor XGroup also participated.
The funds will mainly be used for technology R&D and iteration, mass production and delivery across multiple stock-keeping units, or SKUs, and expansion of the company’s product portfolio. Airseekers will also continue strengthening its supply chain capabilities and improving its global channel network.
The company completed its Series A round last December, bringing its total financing over the past six months to more than RMB 100 million (USD 14.7 million).
Founded in 2022, Airseekers focuses on smart hardware for outdoor yards, with an emphasis on the R&D, design, and manufacturing of boundary-free robotic lawn mowers. Drawing on its proprietary technology and scenario-based innovation capabilities, the company is building a comprehensive smart yard ecosystem around lawn care.
According to reports from Euromonitor and other sources, robotic lawn mowers accounted for 9.1% of global lawn mower sales by value in 2024, indicating relatively low penetration. By region, Europe has reached a penetration rate of 20–30% based on installed bases, with relatively high adoption. Even so, boundary-free products still have room for replacement demand. In North America, where household lawns are large and terrain is more complex, penetration remains below 2%, making it a key market for future expansion.
As the yard robotics market expands, competition is intensifying. Beneath the growing segmentation of the market, along with increasingly homogeneous price wars and feature stacking, lies a mismatch between existing products and users’ deeper needs.
“Users do not want a lawn mower that can move around. They want a lawn that looks good,” Airseekers founder Hu Yue told 36Kr. “The best way to break through competition is to keep innovating and build better products. The industry leader often wins through scaled cost advantages, while the second best tends to beat competitors through differentiation in products and channels.”
That thinking is reflected in Airseekers’ latest flagship product, the Tron Ultra series robotic lawn mower.
The Tron Ultra series is equipped with what Airseekers describes as an industry-first four-wheel independent drive and independent steering system, allowing each wheel to rotate independently at any angle. This enables the robot to perform complex movement patterns, including in-place rotation, lateral movement, and diagonal movement, addressing motion blind spots that traditional robotic lawn mowers struggle to overcome. The system is designed to reduce problems such as turf scuffing, edge blind spots, and getting stuck in complex lawn environments. According to the company, the design marks the first time a complex chassis solution from the automotive sector has been introduced into robotics.
On the engineering side, Airseekers said its R&D team developed an integrated design that combines hub motors with independent steering knuckles to balance compactness, off-road capability, reliability, and cost. The design eliminates traditional mechanical steering tie rods and significantly reduces the number of moving parts. Together with an upgraded vision-based navigation system and the company’s proprietary mulching module, the system improves response speed while reducing failure rates and maintenance costs, according to Airseekers.
The Tron Ultra series has completed R&D and engineering validation and is scheduled to begin global sales in the middle of this year. Airseekers said it will continue using product and channel differentiation to build clearer brand recognition in the mid- to high-end robotic lawn mower market.
In addition to online channels, Airseekers has long focused on building offline specialist channels in Europe and North America, including regional yard equipment specialty stores and garden supply retail chains, to create more stable shipment expectations.
36Kr has learned that Airseekers’ offline channel orders in Europe have increased more than fivefold from the same period last year. Its new robotic lawn mower products have also secured hundreds of millions of RMB in nonbinding orders.
36Kr spoke with Hu to learn more.
The following transcript has been edited and consolidated for brevity and clarity.
36Kr: Europe remains Airseekers’ main market. Has the US market started to gain momentum over the past six months?
Hu Yue (HY): Europe remains our stable base. The US market has begun to grow slowly this year, but the overall pace is still relatively slow. This is also a challenge the entire industry is working to overcome.
Many brands appear to have entered online channels operated by major retailers in North America, but for now, much of that activity is still at the stage of brand exposure and early consumer education.
Based on our observations, US consumers still have deeply rooted stereotypes about Chinese hardware brands expanding overseas. They generally see Chinese products as low-cost alternatives. The perception of Chinese brands as premium and brand-driven is still being built.
This also means that, in the eyes of overseas users, most Chinese hardware companies are effectively starting from the same place. Even large Chinese companies have brand recognition among average US consumers that is seriously mismatched with their scale. The upside is that everyone is starting from a similar position. The downside is that the “cheap and low-end” label is hard to shake in the short term.
36Kr: There has been a lot of discussion about “involution” in China’s robotic lawn mower sector. How do you assess the industry’s current competitive stage?
HY: The industry has entered an elimination phase. It is no longer in the warm-up stage. This phase places high demands on a company’s overall strength, supply chain management, localized service capabilities, and ability to build a global sales network.
But many players remain stuck in shallow involution. They are rushing to stack technologies, compete on specifications, and fight price wars. The competition is premature and surface-level.
Severe product homogenization is also a common industry problem. Most products remain limited to basic mowing functions, while few companies are deeply exploring users’ underlying pain points, such as lawn care, grass mulching, and water-saving irrigation.
Large companies have also taken a relatively conservative approach to entering the market. Some tend to wait until three clearly positioned players have emerged before following them in. They rarely take the initiative to explore the frontier. Smaller startups, constrained by capital and resources, also struggle to support deep R&D. The result is that everyone is competing on the surface, while few are digging for opportunities in deeper waters.
In terms of scenario exploration, commercial smart mowing has yet to produce a mature business model. Some teams are trying, but the market is still far from the scaling stage. Commercial and residential use also follow different logic in terms of channels, R&D, and after-sales service, and they require separate teams. Based on these judgments, we will not focus heavily on the commercial segment at this stage.
36Kr: Airseekers wants to be more than a robotic lawn mower company. What is the company’s ecosystem strategy?
HY: Our underlying principle has never been to make a pile of isolated hardware products. What Airseekers wants to build is a “yard organism” that can evolve on its own and perceive the entire space.
Using the robotic lawn mower as the entry point for perception and interaction, we are continuously accumulating environmental data from yard scenarios, user behavior trajectories, and implicit models of plant growth. Step by step, we are building a cognitive context with semantic understanding capabilities.
But that is only the surface. The real core will be carried by a terminal robot that completely overturns the movement method of today’s wheeled chassis. It will be the industry’s first embodied terminal truly deployed in consumer-grade yard scenarios, a physical interface that connects the physical world with digital perception.
Airseekers’ path forward is clear and long-term. In the short term, we are focused on bringing individual hardware products to market with maximum execution. In the long term, we are accelerating the weaving of an invisible network across the deeper dimensions of the yard ecosystem and embodied intelligence.
What we want is not a tool. It is a high-barrier entry point into smart yards, where the yard is no longer a worksite for machines, but a “second living room” in which people and the environment, data and physical objects, coexist and perceive one another.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Huang Nan for 36Kr.