Lucid Bots raises $20M to keep up with demand for its window-washing drones 

Andrew Ashur, the founder and CEO of window cleaning robot startup Lucid Bots, likes to joke that his company is the antithesis of the robotics industry right now.

While many companies are trying to build humanoids or touting demos of them robots that dance and do somersaultsLucid Bots’ drones are out in the field making traditionally unsexy and dangerous work, like cleaning windows, safer and more efficient.

“The sad truth is that most companies are still selling a lot of hype and headlines, and we are selling workplace performance that is reflected in our customers, wins and losses,” Ashur told TechCrunch. “We’re not just in the lab and in the simulators. We’ve got dirt under our fingernails and we’re on construction sites getting work done.”

Lucid Bots, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a full-stack robotics company that sells its Sherpa drones and Lavo robot to cleaning companies to help them on their job sites. The company designed and manufactures its own robots in the US and just raised a $20 million Series B round co-led by Cubit Capital and Idea Fund Partners. This brings total funding to $34 million.

The company plans to use the money for hiring to meet demand, although Ashur joked that there are no more parking spaces at their production facility.

“We have more requests for demos than there are hours in a day, so we need to scale up capacity and workforce,” Ashur said. “As a founder, if we don’t have enough hours in the day to do all the demos, it gives me a bit of heartburn.”

The demand from customers and investors wasn’t there in the beginning, Ashur said. It took the company half a decade to ship the first 100 robots, and it took quite a bit of convincing to get VCs to back a robotics founder with a liberal arts background and no robotics experience.

Ashur had the original idea for the company when he was a junior at Davidson College studying economics and Spanish. He happened to walk past a building being cleaned by window cleaners. It was a windy day and the workers’ stage started knocking and crashing into the building.

As he watched the harrowing scene, Ashur thought about how technology could make it safer.

“Built infrastructure is literally the largest asset class in the world, but right now we face three compound problems,” Ashur said. “We have an aging infrastructure, the new infrastructure we are building is getting bigger and harder to maintain, and last but not least, we have fewer and fewer people willing and able to do the work. We had to start building drones and robots to bridge that gap.”

Lucid Bots launched in 2018 and started as a cleaning company that took on contract jobs to learn more about the industry. After two years and a few chemical burns, Ashur said they knew what their drone needed to be successful.

Sales of Lucid Bots have been gaining momentum lately. It took the startup five years to sell 100 units and now the number is approaching 1,000.

The company continues to improve its bots and drones in an effort to keep sales going. Data collected by the robots is fed back to the underlying software, improving both Lucid Bots products. The company is also building a tool that will allow its bots to be used for adjacent categories such as waterproofing and sealing, among others.

“We recently waterproofed a massive college stadium that was starting to age, still using the same brains and frame as a Sherpa,” Ashur said. “Part of the reason we went there is because our existing customers were pulling us there and, gosh, we were probably getting about 50 inbound leads a month related to painting and coating, and that was before we even started marketing that option.”