Walk into the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco during the week of April 27, and the scene might have been unexpected. The venue looked less like a temple of art than a sprawling trade fair.
Media representatives, key opinion leaders, and customers from more than 50 countries filled the exhibition area. The products on display ranged from small gadgets, including smart pendants, hair dryers, LED beauty masks, and robot vacuums, to larger appliances such as air conditioners, refrigerators, and smartphones. There was even a concept supercar on show.
Onstage, Turing Award winner David Patterson, former 7-Eleven CEO James Keyes, and a former Meta vice president discussed how artificial intelligence is reshaping the physical world. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and NBA legend Dwyane Wade then walked onto the floor and went head-to-head with robot vacuums.
This was the scene at Dreame’s Next launch event on April 27.
The company is still expanding quickly. In 2025, Dreame’s revenue exceeded RMB 40 billion (USD 5.8 billion), marking its sixth consecutive year of growth above 100%. Its main market has shifted overseas, which now accounts for nearly 80% of revenue. Its products are sold in more than 120 countries and regions, and it has more than 6,500 offline stores.
Dreame’s ambitions go further. In just six months, it has mounted large-scale publicity campaigns and product showcases at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Lunar New Year gala, the Super Bowl, and the Appliance & Electronics World Expo (AWE). Dreame founder and CEO Yu Hao has also said publicly more than once that he wants to build Dreame into a company with USD 1 quadrillion in revenue, a figure roughly equivalent to the market value of 25 Apples.
Dreame’s expanding universe
The theme of the launch event could be summed up in one question: how far can a single company expand?
For now, Dreame has extended its reach into almost every major consumer electronics category. Its portfolio includes complex consumer products such as the Nebula Next 01 Jet Edition, a concept flagship under Dreame’s plan to explore frontier technologies across high-end mobility and other advanced hardware categories.
For now, the car is closer to a technological statement than a commercial product. Dreame’s announced specifications include a response time of 150 milliseconds, 100 kilonewtons of thrust, and acceleration from zero to 100 kilometers per hour in 0.9 seconds. Those figures would put it in the territory of top supercars and aerospace-adjacent engineering. A production model is set to be released next year.
In 2025, Dreame also formally announced its entry into smartphones, another market that has long been saturated.
Liu Yang, head of Dreame Aurora phones, told 36Kr that Aurora’s first phase will involve RMB 10 billion (USD 1.5 billion) in investment to support smartphone innovation and R&D. Dreame also plans to expand the team to at least 2,000 people in 2026 and 5,000 people in 2027.
At the other end of this product matrix is a broad lineup of products at different stages of maturity.
Beyond established categories such as robot vacuums, wet-dry vacuums, vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, air conditioners, refrigerators, and washing machines, Dreame is also developing products still in the prototype stage, including card-shaped recorders and AI pendants. The number of categories is extensive.
The approach resembles applying internet-style experimentation to the hardware industry: test broadly, combine features, learn from mistakes, and iterate quickly. “ByteDance built an app factory. In the robotics era, I will build 1,000 products,” Yu once said in an interview.
Expansion through reusable capabilities
The question is what capability allows a company to expand on this scale.
Although Dreame operates across many categories, its expansion playbook has stayed largely consistent. Dreame started with hair dryers, adding features such as faster motor speeds and AI-powered functions. That approach reflects a broader pattern: improve a product category around one functional advantage, then scale from there.
After the company shifted toward overseas markets and a premium strategy, this product innovation cycle accelerated.
Jiemian News previously reported that Dreame has structured itself around innovation. At the level of individual product units, it cross-combines 250 product leads with 250 sales leads, creating more than 60,000 cells in the matrix. Dreame does not expect every cell to succeed. But when one works, it quickly commits resources, pushes execution, and aims for commercial success.
The technical foundation of this strategy is a large set of reusable underlying capabilities.
One example is the robotic arm. At the launch event, several products were fitted with robotic arms. Robot vacuums and lawn mowers had bionic dual robotic arms. The Z1 robot, designed for laundry care, is equipped with a multi-jointed robotic arm and a multimodal perception system, enabling it to autonomously open washing machine doors and identify and pick up clothing.
Tracks follow the same principle. Dreame has added tracks not only to robotic lawn mowers, but also to robot vacuums. After identifying user demand for robot vacuums that could enter rooms and move up and down stairs, the company adapted the feature for the category.
Seen through this playbook, the dozens of products on display at Dreame’s event looked less like a scattered product lineup than a set of test cases. The robot vacuum is the proven model. Phones and smart rings are new categories under validation. New categories such as automotives are more extreme experiments meant to test the ceiling of the company’s technology.
In product development, hardware is usually considered more time-consuming than software because it requires tooling, supply chains, and production costs. Dreame, however, appears to take a different view. When entering a new category, it uses relatively little capital for early validation, ranging from five-figure RMB sums to larger amounts. Yu put it this way:
“Building cars is not as expensive as people imagine. What is expensive is building the wrong car. Phones are the same. Making a phone is not what costs money. Making the wrong phone is.”
Silicon Valley in spring 2026 may offer another way to understand Dreame.
During the same week as Dreame’s launch event, Silicon Valley layoffs in the first four months of 2026 exceeded 73,000. Anthropic’s CEO also predicted that software engineering would eventually be disrupted by AI. Together, those signals point to a broader concern: some existing business models may struggle to survive a shift in technological paradigms.
No one knows what the industry will look like 18 months from now. In that sense, Dreame’s aggression and Silicon Valley’s anxiety mirror each other. Both are using one extreme to hedge against another. In an era of slow overall growth, the risk of pushing to the limit may be smaller than the risk of standing still.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Deng Yongyi for 36Kr.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.84 = USD 1 based on estimates as of May 5, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are presented for ease of reference and may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.