Hivebotics Raises US$6 Million to Make Robots an Essential Service in Facilities Management

A Singapore-born robotics company is starting with the hardest cleaning job, commercial restrooms, as the fastest way into the rest of the building.

Soft facilities management, covering cleaning, security, catering and related services, was estimated at US$770 billion globally in 2024 and is projected to reach US$1.23 trillion by 2033, according to Grand View Research. Restroom cleaning is its most labour-intensive line, and also its hardest to staff: Kimberly-Clark reports janitorial turnover of 200 to 400 per cent annually. Operators are being asked to hold hygiene standards steady while the workforce that delivers them keeps shrinking.

Hivebotics has spent five years building toward that gap. Founded in 2021 out of the National University of Singapore by Rishab Patwari and Nguyen Tuan Dung, the company has now closed a US$6 million Series A led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India. The capital takes its robot, Abluo, from pilot deployments into volume production, funds expansion of its distributor network across four core markets, and supports further development of HiveIntelligence, the proprietary physical AI layer that plans, monitors and validates every cleaning job.

Abluo is a mobile robot with an articulated arm that cleans a commercial restroom end to end, covering toilets, urinals, sinks and floors, rather than the floor alone as existing cleaning robots do. It works without contact: high-pressure steam, a targeted chemical jet, vacuum extraction and a blow-drying stage replace brushes or cloths, which carry cross-contamination risk between cubicles. Onboard vision identifies each fixture, a proprietary AI pipeline generates the cleaning route in real time, and every job ends with a scored before-and-after check, so outcomes can be audited rather than assumed. The robot has logged nearly 10,000 operating hours over 12 months across more than 20 sites in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, including hospitals, airport terminals and shopping malls, replacing around 30 minutes of manual work with a five-minute human inspection.

Rishab Patwari, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hivebotics, said: "Within three years, teams of robots will do most of the repetitive, labour-intensive work of running a facility. We started with restrooms because they are the hardest: wet, cramped, and full of moving parts. Solve that, and the rest of the building follows. The timing is right. Labour is scarce, physical AI is breaking through, and hardware is getting cheap. Robots are no longer productivity tools. They are essential services."

The bet reflects a broader shift already underway in physical AI, where falling hardware costs and maturing autonomy stacks are moving robots out of narrow, single-task deployments and into work that was previously considered too variable to automate. Facilities management, with its mix of fixed environments and repetitive, well-defined tasks, is emerging as one of the more tractable frontiers for that shift, and restroom cleaning, precisely because it is the hardest version of the problem, offers a proof point for the rest of the building.

Vertex's Perspective

Chan Yip Pang, Executive Director, Investment, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, said: "Restroom cleaning is one of the few labour markets where demand is non-discretionary and supply keeps tightening. In Hivebotics' key markets, the cleaning workforce is ageing and wage floors are rising, so operators need a way to hold hygiene standards without adding headcount they cannot find. Hivebotics is one of the few companies globally solving that specific problem end to end. We are backing the team to take that from Singapore into various regions."

With volume production underway and a distributor network expanding across its four core markets, Hivebotics is positioning restrooms as the entry point for a wider push into automating the physical, repetitive work of running a building.