Matic co-founder Mehul Nariyawala says the goal is to sell 30,000 robots by the end of the year.
For Mehul Nariyawala, a household product’s costly mistake was the jumping-off point for a $20 million company. Nariyawala had a $1,000 robot vacuum, which he watched destroy a rug in his home while he was away. The machine had powerful suction but wasn’t intelligent enough to free itself from the rug. It got stuck, kept running for 45 minutes and tore away a patch of the rug.
“That was a realization that, Wow, this thing is really stupid,” Nariyawala tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. Worse, he found that many robot vacuums could not reliably return to their own 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 says.
That irritation planted the seed for Matic, the home-robotics company Nariyawala co-founded with CEO Navneet Dalal after the pair left Google Nest in 2017. Nariyawala is Matic’s president. Their goal was not simply to make another robot vacuum. It was to build a machine that could safely and quietly navigate the disorder of an actual home, avoiding pets, toys, cords, spills, furniture and the people moving through it.
Nariyawala says Matic has sold more than 13,000 robots since its November 2024 launch, generating an estimated $15 million to $20 million in revenue. Matic’s robot vacuum costs $1,495. Nariyawala said the company employs about 110 people and is aiming to sell 30,000 robots by year-end.
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