Say goodbye to traditional housekeeping, China’s latest innovation is taking room service to the next level. Zerith, a tech startup born in early 2025, has unveiled the Zerith H1, a humanoid robot engineered specifically to tackle the everyday demands of hotel housekeeping.
Unlike home robots like Tesla’s Optimus, the H1 is laser-focused on commercial applications, particularly in hotels, where cleanliness and consistency are critical.
The robot is designed to manage a full suite of housekeeping duties: cleaning bathrooms, vacuuming, mopping floors, organizing toiletries, and even restocking supplies all autonomously. In demo videos, the H1 can be seen gliding seamlessly through rooms, vacuuming floors, and tossing trash into bins without any human input. The company calls this combination of “mopping floors and mapping futures” a leap in spatial AI design.
What sets the H1 apart is its ability to operate across multiple vertical planes. Thanks to an adjustable-height body and universal wheels, it can bend down to retrieve items, stack amenities neatly on shelves, and even line up shoes on a rack while avoiding bumping into furniture or guests.
“Hotels pose unique challenges… the need for precise, repetitive tasks delivered to a high standard,” said the company, emphasizing that the H1 was built to meet these demands head-on.
The robot’s compact build and intelligent mapping system enable it to navigate cluttered, multi-surface hotel environments with the agility and awareness most robots lack. While it shines in cleaning roles, Zerith envisions the H1 as the butler of the future. A future version might respond to guest app requests, delivering towels or freshening rooms the moment a guest steps out, creating an “on-demand” luxury service.
Yet, the company is clear: H1 isn’t here to replace staff, but to support and augment them. It’s designed to handle the “dull, dirty, and demanding” work, freeing up human employees for more nuanced, guest-facing tasks.
Founded in January 2025 and backed by Tsinghua University and the Jianghuai Advanced Technology Center, Zerith is already making waves. Their team combines talent from China’s tech elite—Baidu, ByteDance, iFLYTEK, and MideaC with deep expertise in AI, smart manufacturing, and robotics. Following a successful angel round in February, which raised tens of millions of yuan, the company has begun mass production and received multi-million-yuan orders.
Zerith aims to deliver over 500 humanoid robots in 2025 alone, expanding beyond hotels into education, entertainment, and exhibitions.
