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

Andrew Ashor, 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 promote their robots that dance and do flips, Lucid Bots drones are out in the field doing traditionally unsexy and dangerous work, like cleaning windows, much safer and more efficiently.

“The sad truth is that most of them are still selling a lot of hype and headlines, and we’re selling on-site performance that shows up in our clients and P&Ls,” Ashur told TechCrunch. “We don’t just work in the lab and simulators. We have dirt under our fingernails, and we go to job sites to get the work done.”

Lucid Bots, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, is an integrated 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 just raised a $20 million Series B round co-led by Cubit Capital and Idea Fund Partners. This brings its total funding to $34 million.

The company plans to use the money for hiring to keep up with demand, although Ashur joked that they ran out of parking spaces at their manufacturing facility.

“We have more requests for demos then we have hours in the day, so we need to increase capacity and headcount,” Ashour 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.”

Ashour said that demand from customers and investors was not there at first. It took the company half a decade to ship its first 100 robots, and it took a fair amount of convincing to get venture capitalists to back a robotics founder who had a liberal arts background and no robotics experience.

Ashur got the original idea for the company when he was a junior at Davidson College studying economics and Spanish. He happened to be walking near a building that was being cleaned by window washers. It was a windy day, and the workers’ trapeze began to swing and hit the building.

Watching this horrific scene made Ashur think about how to make technology safer.

“Built infrastructure is literally the largest asset class in the world, but right now, we have these three compound issues,” Ashur said. “We have aging infrastructure, the new infrastructure we’re building is getting bigger and harder to maintain, and last but not least, there are fewer and fewer people willing and able to do this work. We had to start building drones and robots to fill this 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 in cleanup, Ashur said they know what their drone needs to be successful.

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

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

“We recently waterproofed a huge university stadium, which was beginning to age, and it still uses the same brain and frame as a Sherpa,” Ashur said. “Part of the reason we went there was because our existing customers were attracting us there and we were getting, oh my gosh, about 50 or so leads a month regarding paint and coatings, and that was before we started marketing that option.”