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

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

While many companies are trying to build humanoids or perfect demos of their robots that dance and do flips, Lucid Bots’ drones are out in the field doing unusual and dangerous work, like cleaning windows, security and efficiency.

“The sad truth is that most are still selling a lot of hype and headlines, and we’re selling performance on the job site that is visible to our customers, profit, and loss,” Ashur told TechCrunch. “We’re not just in the workplace and in the modeling industry. We’ve got dirt under our fingers, and we’re getting out of the workplace and doing the work.”

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

The company plans to use rental income to keep up with demand, although Ashur jokes that they have run out of parking spaces at their manufacturing facility.

“We have a lot of requests for demos, and we have daytime hours, so we need to increase capacity and headcount,” Ashur said. “As a founder, when we don’t have enough hours in the day to do all the demos, it gives me a little heartburn.”

The demand from customers and investors was not there in the beginning, Ashur said. It took the company half a decade to ship its first 100 robots, and it took a fair amount of convincing to get VCs to back a robotics inventor with a liberal arts background and no experience in robotics.

Ashur got the first idea for the company when he was a freshman at Davidson College studying economics and Spanish. He walked by a building that was being cleaned by window cleaners. It was a windy day, and the workers’ swing stage began to knock and hit the building.

Watching the terrifying scene made Ashur think about how technology could make this safer.

“Built infrastructure is the largest asset class in the world, but right now, we have these three problems that are compounding,” Ashur said. “We have aging infrastructure, the new infrastructure we are building is getting bigger and harder to maintain, and, finally, we have fewer people who are willing and able to do this work. We needed to start building drones and robots to close that gap.”

Lucid Bots was 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 new cleaning chemicals, Ashur said they know what their drone needs to be successful.

Lucid Bots sales have grown significantly recently. It took five years to start selling 100 units and now they are approaching 1,000.

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

“Recently we closed a huge university sports field that was starting to wear out, it still uses the same brain and frame as Sherpa,” said Ashur. “Part of why we went there was because our existing customers were pulling us there and we were getting 50 or more leads a month related to painting and coating and that was before we started marketing that way.”