On a February evening in Suzhou, the founder and CEO of Dreame Technology, Yu Hao, took the stage at a stadium rented for his company’s annual gala and cast an audacious vision. The 1987‑born Tsinghua graduate asked employees to wish for Dreame to become “the greatest company in human history” and for himself to become the world’s richest person, while circulating a social‑media post that aimed to lift the “Dreame ecosystem” to an almost unfathomable scale. The rhetoric was theatrical but it was matched by numbers: Chinese reporting says Dreame’s revenue surpassed RMB 40 billion in 2025, after years of triple‑digit growth, and that many of its businesses are already profitable or cash‑flow positive by the company’s own account.
What began in 2017 as a high‑speed motor specialist selling cordless vacuums and hair dryers has in less than a decade metastasized into a sprawling constellation of businesses. Dreame’s robot vacuum is now ranked among the global top three and holds first place in 22 markets; the firm has stretched into full‑line home appliances, small kitchen electrics, smartphones, and even automobile projects. Many units are organised as independent business units (BUs), each with separate finance, hiring and funding authority, a structure that Dreame says accelerates decision‑making and allows rapid scaling.
Dreame’s product strategy is deliberately pragmatic: the company scans existing market leaders, reverse‑engineers successful models and layers on one to three “dimensionality‑reducing” technical differentiators intended to lower the risk of failure. That formula—fast prototyping, heavy initial inventory commitments, aggressive promotion and rapid iteration—has delivered breakout SKUs and a playbook Dreame replicates across dozens of BUs. Executives say this reuses core technologies—motors, sensing, AI—across product families and creates a compounding advantage as more modules and patents are developed.
The culture inside Dreame is built around ambitious targets and incentives. New hires are asked to state stretch goals and receive direct feedback from Yu; employees describe a flat organisation in which high performers can ascend rapidly and teams receive monthly profit‑sharing allocations. That intensity produces believers who liken Dreame to a startup accelerator, but it also drives turnover and occasional criticism: former staff complain of organisational chaos, unclear priorities in some nascent BUs and a pace that can be unsustainable.
Fueling the expansion has been capital and an internal financing apparatus. Dreame graduated from Xiaomi’s ecosystem partners and in 2021 raised a headline C‑round of RMB 3.6 billion; in 2023 the firm launched an in‑house venture fund, Sky Factory, to seed and scale companies inside its orbit. Yu has publicly signalled a plan to float many ecosystem businesses on global markets in a wave of IPOs beginning in late 2026, a strategy that would monetise the group’s scale but increases exposure to market cycles and investor scrutiny.
Observers point to an obvious precedent: LeEco’s ecology playbook, which once dazzled investors and then unraveled when liquidity tightened and governance frictions emerged. Yu has rebutted direct comparisons, arguing Dreame has solved globalisation, achieved industry‑leading margins and built a profitable, R&D‑heavy model—claims that are hard for outside analysts to fully verify given limited public disclosure. The company’s insistence that overseas sales now make up 80% of revenue, if accurate, marks Dreame as more global than many of its rivals, but also more sensitive to foreign demand and regulatory shifts.
The broader significance extends beyond a single company. Dreame’s trajectory exemplifies a new pattern in Chinese consumer hardware: rapid modular scaling, internal venture funding, and a readiness to compete directly with established incumbents across multiple categories. That model can deliver high growth and fast market share gains, but it also concentrates execution risk across many fronts—supply chain, product quality, capital markets and talent retention. For international investors and competitors, Dreame is now a test case of whether aggressive, platform‑style hardware expansion can be sustained outside the internet software world.
For now, Dreame sits at an inflection point. It has the revenues, a loyal cadre of employees and a provocative founder willing to court controversy. Whether that translates into a durable, diversified industrial group or a leveraged ecosystem that strains under its own ambition depends on the company’s discipline in governance, the resilience of its cash flows through economic cycles, and how successfully it converts dozens of experimental businesses into independently viable public companies.