In 2016, three engineers, Armin Koller, Martin Gadient and Thomas Oberholzer saw a problem in industrial cleaning that nobody was solving.

Warehouses were growing; automation was accelerating, but cleaning, the task meant to keep every facility safe and running, was still stuck in the past. Time was lost. Resources wasted. Money spent on a task that repeated forever. Dust that no one had solved.

With an idea and a whiteboard, they started working on the first KEMARO robot inside a shipping container. A decade later, KEMARO’s robots run in facilities across 26 countries. More than 1,000 of them are in operation right now, sweeping warehouse floors that never sleep. The container is long gone. The idea that filled it is everywhere.  

A problem hiding in plain sight

The founders were engineers first. They knew they could make industrial cleaning more efficient, and to do it with a machine that could work on its own. That’s where the name comes from. KEMARO stands for Kehrmaschinenroboter – Sweeping machine robots. Not a metaphor, simply the thing they were building.

We asked the founders to describe those early days. Naïve, optimistic and carefree, they agreed, without hesitation. They mean it as a compliment to their younger selves. You have to be a little naive to start something this hard. You have to be optimistic to keep going. Carefree, because they were engineers chasing an idea, unburdened by the weight of everything that comes with running a company.

That combination is rare. It's also exactly what it takes to start something in a shipping container and turn it into a company that ships autonomous cleaning robots worldwide from Eschlikon.

The part they did not see coming

Here's what surprised them.

They knew how to design the product. That was never the question; after all, all three of them are engineers. The robot was an engineering problem they could solve. What caught them off guard was everything around the robot.  

The robotics industry, they learned, is not a single discipline. It's dozens of disciplines working together.  To take a machine from a sketch to a customer's warehouse, you need mechanical engineers and software developers, yes, but also sales teams, supply-chain specialists, service technicians, marketers, finance, support, quality control. A great robot is only the beginning.  A company is what actually delivers it.

That is what has shaped KEMARO into the company it is today, and it shows in every robot that rolls off the line.

A Local Success Story

The milestones came faster than anyone in that container would have predicted.

In 2018, the first robots went into real industrial facilities for market validation. In 2021, the K900 , KEMARO's autonomous industrial sweeper, launched as a series product across Switzerland, Germany and Austria. By 2022, KEMARO had crossed into the wider EU, the United Kingdom and Japan. In 2023, it reached North America.

Today the fleet passes 1,000 robots, distributed across 26 countries, all still engineered and assembled in Eschlikon, Switzerland. They sweep warehouses, but also woodworking shops, food plants, metalworking floors and logistics hubs - anywhere dust is a problem worth solving.

That is often how genuine innovation travels. You do the work properly, for the right reasons, and it turns out the problem you were solving belonged to everyone.

The Next 10 Years

So, what comes next?

KEMARO's founders have a clear vision for the decade ahead: a KEMARO robot in every warehouse. Not as a slogan, but as a genuine ambition, one built on the same belief that started this whole journey. Industrial cleaning should be efficient, safe and autonomous, everywhere it happens.

Robotics innovation doesn't stand still, and neither does KEMARO. The company that began in a container is now working toward a future where autonomous warehouse cleaning isn't the exception. It's the standard.

Ten years in, the naivety is gone. The optimism remains, sharper and better founded than ever. The carefree days are behind them too, replaced by something steadier: purpose.

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Want to hear the story straight from the founders?

Watch the full interview below.