Ex-Google Duo's Robot Vacuum Startup Hits $20 Million Revenue

Matic has sold more than 13,000 robot vacuums since launching in November 2024, generating an estimated $15 million to $20 million in revenue, company president and co-founder Mehul Nariyawala said in an interview with Entrepreneur. The $1,495 machine comes from a company of roughly 110 people that now aims to sell 30,000 robots by year-end.

The origin story starts with a destroyed rug. Nariyawala's own $1,000 robot vacuum got stuck on a rug in his home, ran for 45 minutes and tore away a patch while he was away. "That was a realization that, Wow, this thing is really stupid," he said. He also found many machines couldn't reliably find their charging docks. "To me, it's an oxymoron to call these things robots because if it's a robot and it can't even find its own dock, what good is it?" he said.

That frustration led to Matic, the home-robotics company Nariyawala co-founded with CEO Navneet Dalal after both left Google Nest in 2017.

What came before Matic?

Before writing a line of code, the founders wrote a 21-page "problem memo" dissecting why customers disliked existing robot vacuums and what a useful home robot would need to do. "We just kept going again and again and again at every level until we deeply understood the problem," Nariyawala said.

Nariyawala grew up in India, moved to the U.S. for high school and studied at the University of Maryland, graduating in 1999. His first startup job burned through $30 million in 11 months. "That was my how-not-to-ruin-a-startup 101," he said. After consulting at Accenture and an MBA from Chicago Booth, he joined computer-vision startup Like.com in 2005, where he met Dalal, whose doctoral work shaped classical computer vision.

Google acquired Like.com in 2010. The pair then built Flutter, a gesture-recognition app that let users control iTunes and Spotify with a webcam — wave to skip a track, shush to mute. It hit No. 1 in Apple's Mac App Store in 73 countries in 2012. Google bought Flutter in late 2013.

Flutter taught them a hard lesson. "No one wakes up in the morning and says, 'Today I'm gonna buy gestures,'" Nariyawala said. "It's a really cool app but not necessarily a product that can potentially generate revenue."

At Nest, Nariyawala led products in the camera portfolio, including Nest Cam and the Nest Hello doorbell. Dalal led perception and computer vision on the same products. The takeaway: product means the whole customer experience, from purchase to support. "When they reach out to you, that's the first time they're meeting humans behind Matic," he said of support calls.

Why privacy drives the design?

Working on Nest cameras, Nariyawala noticed indoor cameras pointed outside — including his wife's. After leaving Google, she refused indoor cameras at home. "That's when I realized that for her, privacy mattered," he said.

Matic's robot processes its understanding of the home on-device rather than acting as an always-recording cloud camera. "As fathers and homeowners, we don't want to jeopardize privacy just to keep our floors clean," Nariyawala said. "Why would I invite something that is recording them and putting it out onto the cloud?"

How does it handle messy homes?

The robot uses two RGB cameras, local computing and a taller body for a better vantage point. "We wanted to build a vantage point that was much more like a human crawling child," Nariyawala said. He argues LiDAR-based rivals lack context to tell a person from a cabinet or a pile of clothes. "It has no contextual awareness," he said. Matic builds an "absolute map" of the home that works even if the dock moves.

How did the funding play out?

The founders self-funded Matic for roughly a year and a half, until a 2018 prototype and a spring 2019 demo where a person could point to a mess and tell the robot to clean it. "Venture capital funding, or institutional funding, is like rocket fuel," Nariyawala said. "The best time to go get rocket fuel is when your rocket is ready and docked."

Matic has raised $115 million to date, with early backers including Jack Dorsey, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison and Nest co-founder Matt Rogers. Shipping slipped from a planned 2020-2021 to November 2024. "Hardware is hard," Nariyawala said. "If hardware is 10 times harder than software, then building a robot is 100 times harder than software."

What does the FCC ban change?

In August, the FCC banned foreign-made advanced robots, including robot vacuums, blocking new foreign models from import and sales approval. Nariyawala says the ban doesn't affect Matic — its current robot is grandfathered in — and makes building in the U.S. "easier." He contacted the FCC directly. "The FCC and government have been very much accommodating and understanding what we're doing," he said. "We cannot guarantee the security and privacy of the robot unless we assemble it in the United States," he added, noting U.S. assembly was a decision made from 2017 onward.

The company recently shipped "Cues," an update adding voice and gesture control that understands more than 70 spoken languages — aimed at kids, older adults and non-English speakers. Roughly two-thirds of orders come from word-of-mouth. "The only evergreen marketing channel is a great product," Nariyawala said. Matic's roadmap runs from floor cleaning to a "trusted organizer" and, eventually, a robot handling complex household planning — with the founding principle intact: "Customers don't want hardware or robots. They want a solution to their problems."