As founder and CEO of Robocore, Roy Lim has shaped one of the world’s most quietly influential service robotics platforms. Today, Robocore machines operate across homes, hospitals, hotels, offices, retail spaces and factories in more than a dozen markets worldwide.
They are designed around tasks such as cleaning floors, monitoring air quality, assisting elderly residents, registering guests, and enabling remote medical consultations. At the heart of Robocore’s success is an open-platform philosophy. Through its subsidiary, RoboTemi Global, the company enables developers and enterprises to build custom skills on top of its robots, tailoring them precisely to operational needs. This flexibility has attracted major clients including UBS, IBM and MTR, and has helped Robocore deploy more than 15,000 robots across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
As Hong Kong confronts a growing technology talent shortage, Lim has taken a hands-on role in reshaping how the robotics workforce is built. Through a partnership with Generation Hong Kong, he helped design the city’s first “Robot Support Assistant” programme. It trains specialists to maintain, operate and support robots in real-world environments. In doing so, Lim has helped unlock new career pathways for young people with special educational needs (SEN), recognising that traits like focus, logic and pattern recognition are often underappreciated strengths.
Before founding Robocore, Roy Lim modernised his family business, Tung Hing Automation, Hong Kong’s largest distributor of industrial robotic arms from brands such as Mitsubishi Electric Automation. In 2014, he read about a deadly industrial explosion in China caused by combustible metal dust. Lim then spent two years developing an automated polishing machine to remove workers from hazardous environments.
Roy Lim’s long-term vision is to build a global hub where robots act as the connective tissue between digital systems and the physical world. While many fear that robots will one day replace jobs, Lim believes robotics will not eliminate human value but redistribute it by creating new roles for programmers, operators, remote workers, and people previously excluded from the labour market.
