Andrew Ashur, founder and CEO of window cleaning robot startup Lucid Bots, likes to joke that his company is the antithesis of today’s robotics industry.
While many companies are building humanoids or promoting demonstrations of robots dancing and somersaulting, Lucid Bots’ drones are out in the field doing traditionally unsexy and dangerous tasks like cleaning windows more safely and efficiently.
“The sad reality is that most companies still sell on hype and headlines, and we sell on-the-ground performance that shows up in customers, profits, and losses,” Ashur told TechCrunch. “We’re not just in the lab or in a simulator. We’ve got dirt under our fingernails and we’re out in the field doing the work.”
Lucid Bots, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a full-stack robotics company that sells its Sherpa drones and Lavo robots to cleaning companies to help them with their jobs on the job. The company designs and manufactures its own robots in the US and just raised $20 million in a 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 to hire to meet demand, but Ashur joked that it has run out of parking at its manufacturing facility.
“With more demo requests and more hours in the day, we need more capacity and more people,” Ashour said. “As a founder, I get a little heartburn when I don’t have enough time in the day to do all the demos.”
Demand from customers and investors wasn’t there initially, Ashour said. It took five years for the company to ship its first 100 robots, and it took a lot of convincing for VCs to back a robotics founder who had a liberal arts background but no experience in robotics.
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Ashur came up with the original idea for the company while studying economics and Spanish at Davidson College. He happened to pass by a building where a window cleaner was cleaning. It was a windy day, and the worker’s swing stage started shaking and crashed into the building.
Seeing the tragic scene, Ashur thought about how technology could make it safer.
“Constructed infrastructure is literally the largest asset class in the world, but right now we have these three complex problems,” Ashour said. “Our infrastructure is aging, and the new infrastructure we are building is becoming larger and increasingly difficult to maintain. And last but not least, there are fewer and fewer people willing and able to do the work. We had to start building drones and robots to fill that gap.”
Founded in 2018, Lucid Bots started as a contract cleaning company to learn more about the industry. After two years and several burns from cleaning chemicals, Ashur said he understood what it would take for the drone to be successful.
Lucid Bots sales have been gaining momentum lately. It took the startup five years to sell 100 units, but it is now approaching 1,000.
The company continues to improve its bots and drones to continue growing sales. The data collected by the robots is fed back into the underlying software and used to improve both Lucid Bots products. The company is also building tools that will enable the bot to be used in adjacent categories such as paint waterproofing and sealing.
“We recently waterproofed a huge university stadium that was starting to deteriorate, using the same brains and bones as Sherpa,” Ashour said. “Part of the reason we went there was because our existing customers were pulling us there and we were getting probably about 50 or so inbound leads a month related to paint and coatings. And that was before we started marketing that option.”
