From a mother's wish for effortless cleaning to a global leader in smart floor care, the robotics pioneer marks a decade of category-defining growth
NEW YORK, Oct. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Founded in 2016 in Songshan Lake, Dongguan, China, Narwal celebrates its 10th anniversary today, marking a decade of groundbreaking achievements in smart home cleaning. The company pioneered the category with the world's first self-cleaning robot vacuum and mop, which was named TIME's Best Inventions of 2020. Today, Narwal ranks among the world's top five robot vacuum brands by shipment volume (IDC, 2025), having shipped 1.7 million units globally in 2025, a 28.7% year-over-year increase. Through a decade of rapid expansion across 30 countries and regions, Narwal has remained anchored to its founding north star: Clean for Love.
"Narwal started with a simple wish: to make my mother's life a little easier," said Junbin Zhang, founder and CEO of Narwal. "That same wish now lives in more than 6 million homes globally. But what I'm most proud of isn't our scale; it's that our DNA hasn't changed. We still build products the way we did from day one: by looking at a real problem a family faces with floor care and engineering a dedicated solution for it."
A Mother's Wish
Narwal's story began ten years ago in a 270-square-foot office with a founding team of fewer than ten people. After overhearing his mother express frustration over the exhausting daily chore of mopping, Zhang found the motivation to start the company. That everyday struggle led to the product that defined Narwal's early years: T10, the world's first robot vacuum and mop with a self-cleaning system built into the base station. It fundamentally reshaped modern floor care and gave people their time back to spend with loved ones.
Clean is What We Do. Love is Why We Do It.
Born from a genuine desire to understand how people actually live, Narwal has spent the past decade studying homes and engineering solutions that make a real difference. Guided by three core principles: humanity, innovation, and freedom, Narwal believes technology should serve people. The company designs for actual household needs rather than racing to pad specs on paper. The ultimate goal is to deliver a cleaning-free lifestyle, freeing up time for what matters most.
The Engine Behind the Growth
A decade of user-centric innovation is now driving rapid global growth. Overseas revenue surged nearly 50% year-on-year from January to April 2026. When the flagship Narwal Flow 2 launched on Amazon U.S., it claimed the #1 spot in the robot vacuum new release category within 24 hours, with sales up 305% year-on-year over the prior generation.
Powering these results is a robust R&D engine featuring more than 1,500 patent filings and a team of over 700 engineers, who make up more than 40% of Narwal's global workforce. Rather than relying on outsourced manufacturing, Narwal controls its supply chain end to end, from R&D through manufacturing and delivery. This integrated structure enables rapid product iteration and strict cost control, allowing the company to innovate without eroding brand value through price wars.
A Decade of Category-Defining Milestones
Narwal has grown from a start-up into a global household leader through a series of industry firsts:
- 2019: After three years of dedicated R&D, Narwal launched the T10, introducing automatic mop washing to the world and marking its first step from innovation into market.
- 2021: The industry's first modular automatic water refill system hit the market.
- 2022: AI DirtSense™ became the first system to detect dirt in real time by analyzing wastewater, setting a new benchmark for smart cleaning.
- 2023: The Freo X Ultra featured a cyclonic anti-tangle roller brush, certified by SGS and TÜV.
- 2024: To tackle the complexity of real-world homes, Narwal launched Freo Z Ultra, the world's first fully intelligent cleaning robot with dual RGB cameras and a dual-chip vision system. It reads its surroundings and adapts its cleaning strategy.
- 2025 – 2026: The Flow series pioneered the industry's first real-time self-cleaning track mop, keeping the mop clean throughout every cleaning cycle.
Every Narwal innovation is designed with the whole home in mind. Recognizing that pets are part of the family, Narwal developed an anti-tangle roller system to tackle pet hair with less maintenance. Hot-water mopping helps remove stubborn, dried-on stains, while AI-powered obstacle recognition enables robots to navigate changing household environments, from avoiding crawling babies to identifying specific spills. With deep carpet cleaning capabilities and extended battery life, Narwal delivers a thorough, reliable clean across large homes and mixed floor types.
The Next Chapter
As Narwal enters its second decade, the company will continue to perfect floor care while deepening its commitment to smarter, scenario-adapted solutions, and advancing into broader spatial cleaning. The robotics industry will continue to evolve, but the core philosophy that sparked the company, "Clean for Love," will remain unchanged.
About Narwal
Narwal is dedicated to developing innovative products that transform daily life. Our range of solutions addresses common challenges, with a focus on understanding and meeting user needs through extensive R&D. This commitment has yielded industry firsts such as the Auto-washing mop, AI-powered DirtSense™, and the DualFlow Tangle-Free System. We obsess over every detail to ensure our products are both functional and aesthetically pleasing, aiming to blend design and performance for a better daily life. As a top-five global vacuum brand, Narwal serves over 6 million users across 30 countries, including North America, South Korea, Germany, and Australia. Our innovations have been honored with awards such as the CES Innovation Awards, the Edison Gold Award, and Time Magazine's Best Inventions. Learn more at Narwal.com.
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Narwal Celebrates 10 Years of Innovation, Bringing Smart Floor Care to Over 6 Million Households Worldwide
71% of financial institutions are converging detection technology, yet 86% report missed links between fraud and money laundering, finds global survey by Datos Insights and SAS
CARY, N.C., Oct. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Financial institutions are increasingly integrating their fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) systems, but intelligence and governance gaps remain. New fraud and AML convergence research from Datos Insights, commissioned by data and AI leader SAS, finds 86% report missed links between fraud activity and money laundering.
What did a global survey of fraud and financial crime executives reveal about the convergence of fraud and AML, commonly known as FRAML? Dive into the latest report from Datos Insights and SAS.
Fraud and AML Convergence: Closing the Speed Gap – based on a survey of 165 fraud and AML executives across 21 countries in seven global regions – examines the convergence of fraud prevention and AML compliance, commonly called FRAML. The report argues that real-time payments now move funds faster than institutions can connect their fraud and AML intelligence and intervene. Experts from Datos Insights, SAS and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will discuss the study's findings in a live "Future of FRAML" webinar on Nov. 2 (available later on demand).
"Fraud and AML teams can look at different pieces of the same risk and still miss the connection," said Serpil Hall, Strategic Advisor for Fraud and AML at Datos Insights. "Technology can help bridge those gaps, but technology alone is not the answer. The institutions making progress are also connecting data, case management, investigations and information sharing so they can see more of the risk in broader context and act sooner."
Shared infrastructure ≠ shared intelligence
Historically, banks' fraud and anti-money laundering units were not designed to operate as a unified function. Each answers to different regulations and runs on different legal clocks. Institutions are closing the gap where it's least disruptive: the technology. Meanwhile, changes that require people and process shifts lag behind. The result is connected systems but disconnected intelligence.
- 71% are actively converging fraud and AML detection and monitoring technology, but only 13% are doing the same for governance, policies and organizational structure.
- 72% run fraud and AML analytics on shared infrastructure but keep separate models and processes; just 1% report sharing data, models, infrastructure and governance across both functions.
- 87% describe their ability to build a unified view of customer risk across fraud and AML as partial, with significant gaps.
Silos remain the biggest barrier to greater alignment between fraud and AML. Nearly 9 in 10 (88%) institutions rate organizational silos, including separate reporting lines, as a primary or major barrier, ahead of technology limitations (73%) and data governance and quality issues (70%).
The strain is felt in day-to-day operations, too: 64% cite legacy technology among their biggest internal challenges, while 63% call out high false-positive rates.
Inside the speed gap: real-time payments, next-day detection
Fraud systems score transactions in milliseconds, while AML monitoring typically runs after the fact, often in overnight batches. As real-time payments become the norm, the margin between the two is fading.
Nearly three-quarters of institutions (73%) say their fraud and AML teams share data often or always during active investigations. That figure drops to just 17% for automated monitoring – the layer that works without someone needing to notice a problem first. The result is often a connection made after an investigation is initiated rather than one flagged automatically before money moves.
Operating separately carries measurable consequences, too, including duplicate alerts or cases, cited by 81% of institutions, and higher operating costs from duplicated teams or technology (71%).
"Financial crime convergence is a risk problem, not just a compliance exercise," said Stu Bradley, Senior Vice President of Risk, Fraud and Compliance Solutions at SAS. "Regulators will increasingly expect institutions to identify and prevent illicit behavior before the money laundering even starts. That's only possible when fraud and AML are working from the same strategic playbook and sharing data up front."
FRAML, from concept to market reality
The research findings arrive as fraud and AML convergence evolves from a long-discussed industry concept into a real-world operating model. Urgency is increasing as AI-charged scams, deepfakes, mule networks and real-time payments further blur traditional boundaries between fraud and money laundering.
"Many of the banks I speak with are already sharing data or exploring common case management, with the aim of getting fraud and AML working closer to real time," added Hall.
For institutions still early in the process, the report outlines practical first steps, such as connecting their existing fraud and financial crime compliance solutions rather than replacing them.
"Institutions don't have to rip and replace their entire financial crime ecosystem to make progress," said SAS' Bradley. "Modernize step by step. Start with the risks that matter most, strengthen data sharing across the monitoring lifecycle and ensure a shared investigative environment."
To explore how institutions can put the report's findings into practice, AWS and Datos Insights will join SAS for the live webinar Breaking the Silos: What Global Banks Reveal About the Future of FRAML on Nov. 2 at 10 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. CET, with on-demand viewing to follow.
Experts will discuss how banks are approaching fraud and AML convergence, the barriers slowing progress, and where data, analytics and AI can help institutions connect signals and identify financial crime earlier.
The full report is available at sas.com/framlreport.
About Datos Insights
Datos Insights is the leading research and advisory partner to the banking, insurance, securities, and payments industries, both the financial services firms and the technology providers who serve them.
In an era of rapid change, we empower firms across the financial services ecosystem to make high-stakes decisions with confidence and speed. Our distinctive combination of expert advice, proprietary data, and community provides actionable insights that enable clients to accelerate critical initiatives, inspire decisive action, and de-risk strategic investments to achieve faster, bolder transformation.
About SAS
SAS is a global leader in data and AI, helping organizations make confident decisions with AI they can trust. For decades, SAS has set the standard for delivering software that drives meaningful impact, incorporating deep industry expertise, transparency and governance. SAS gives you THE POWER TO KNOW®.
SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2026 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.
Danielle Bates | danielle.bates@sas.com | 919-531-1959 | sas.com/news
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Banks are connecting fraud and AML defenses but still missing links
