At 2 a.m. in Terminal 5, a low-slung machine traces the same polished floor it cleaned yesterday, dodging luggage carts with the ease of a seasoned night-shift worker. Half a world away in Singapore, another rolls through Changi's arrival hall before the first flight lands. The company that built them is not American, Japanese, or European — it is headquartered in Shanghai, and it just topped a global market ranking.
Gausium (高仙机器人), founded in 2013 and formerly known in Chinese as Gaoxian, has been ranked the world's No. 1 commercial cleaning-robot supplier by both shipments and revenue in IDC's Worldwide Annual Commercial Cleaning Robotics Tracker, 2025 — a double lead it says it has held for several consecutive years. The result was announced in July 2026 via PRNewswire.
A market suddenly in a hurry
The category Gausium leads is small but accelerating fast. IDC puts global commercial cleaning-robot shipments at 58,000 units in 2025, up 83.8% year-on-year, with the market valued at US$760 million, up 48.5%. For context, that is a fraction of the broader commercial-service-robot pie, but cleaning is the slice IDC calls among the most certain applications — because the task is structured, the ROI is legible, and nobody is asking the machine to hold a conversation.
Gausium says it has served more than 6,500 flagship customers across 70-plus countries and regions. The client list reads like an airport and retail directory: Heathrow, Singapore Changi and Doha among aviation hubs; Carrefour, Auchan and Rossmann in retail; Coca-Cola and DHL in warehousing and logistics; and property managers such as China Overseas Property, Poly Property and Vanke Cloud.
What 'number one' actually means here
Market-share crowns are easy to overstate, so it is worth separating the claims. IDC's tracker ranks vendors on shipments and revenue, and Gausium led on both — and, per IDC's breakdown relayed by trade outlets, first across the core application segments it tracks and in the major regions of Europe, the Americas and Asia-Pacific. One quoted figure: Gausium held a 53.06% shipment share among China-based vendors' overseas sales.
The company itself claims an even stronger domestic position — over 90% of China's commercial floor-cleaning market, more than 60% in Asia and over 50% in Europe — but those are company-stated numbers, not IDC's, and should be read as self-reported. What is harder to dispute is the repeatability: Gausium frames its 2026 milestone as moving from winning one-off "flagship" projects to rolling out fleets for chain customers across countries — the difference between selling a machine and delivering a system that runs for years.
Why airports are the ultimate test
An airport floor is a brutal place for a robot. It is enormous, littered with unpredictable humans, open around the clock, and governed by safety and hygiene rules that vary by country. If a cleaning robot works at Heathrow and Changi, it has cleared a bar that dissolves (消解) most pilot-stage excuses.
Gausium's founder and CEO, Edward Cheng (程昊天), framed the IDC rankings as "a vote of confidence cast by customers around the world in real purchase orders." That phrasing matters: in robotics, a purchase order beats a press demo every time. The company runs production capacity it says reaches about 30,000 units a year across bases in Suzhou and Ziyang, Sichuan, and it has funded growth through rounds including a RMB 1.2 billion (about $169 million / HK$1.31 billion) C round in 2021 and a RMB 150 million (around $21 million / HK$164 million) B+ round in 2024.
The next fight: robots that fix themselves
Gausium's forward bet is less about selling more boxes and more about full-process intelligence. The next generation, Cheng argues, must combine sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, vacuuming and disinfection on one platform, deploy out of the box, and increasingly maintain themselves — so facilities teams are freed from repetitive upkeep rather than simply handed a new machine to babysit.
That is where the real competitive line is being drawn. The first decade of commercial cleaning robots was about single-task automation. The next, Gausium and its rivals agree, is about machines that perceive a complex environment, decide, execute and self-maintain. IDC expects the broader commercial-service-robot market to keep growing through 2030, with cleaning among the steadiest bets.
Honest limitations
The central claim — IDC ranking Gausium No. 1 by shipments and revenue in 2025, plus the 58,000-unit and US$760-million market figures — comes from IDC's tracker as distributed through PRNewswire and trade reprints; it is a market-research figure, not a regulator's audit. Gausium's own customer count (6,500+), country coverage (70+), and its 90%/60%/50% regional share claims are company-stated and not independently verified here. The 30,000-unit annual capacity and the 2021/2024 funding amounts are reported by Chinese corporate profiles (including Baidu Baike) and should be treated as company-disclosed. Airport and retail client names are drawn from Gausium's own press materials. "Most certain application" is IDC's qualitative characterization, not a guarantee of future performance.
What readers can do now
- Next time you are in a major airport or supermarket abroad, look down — the robot polishing the floor may well be Chinese-made, and that is a cleaner read on industrial competitiveness than any launch video.
- Facility managers evaluating these machines should pilot one on a single, messy, 24-hour site (an airport concourse or a hospital corridor) before trusting vendor range claims.
- Track IDC-style shipment and revenue rankings, not funding headlines, when judging which robotics exporters are actually winning global customers.