Lucid Bots has raised $20M to meet the demand for its window cleaning drones

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

Although many companies trying to create humanoids or their demos robots dancing and doing twistsLucid Bots drones are in the field making unpleasant and dangerous tasks, such as window cleaning, safe and efficient.

“The sad truth is that many are still selling hype and headlines, and we sell jobs in a workplace that shows our customers, profits, and losses,” Ashur told TechCrunch. “We’re not just in laboratories and testing machines anymore. We’ve got dirt under our fingernails, and we’re going to the workplace to work.”

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

The company plans to use the money to hire more people to meet the demand, though Ashur joked that they will run out of parking at their manufacturing facility.

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

Demand from customers and investors was not there to begin with, Ashur said. It took the company half a decade to ship its first 100 robots, and it took enough convincing for VCs to back the tech-savvy and non-robotics startup.

Ashur got the original idea for the company when he was a junior at Davidson College studying economics and Spanish. He just passed by a house that was being cleaned with a window washer. It was a windy day, and the workers’ stage began to shake and hit the building.

Seeing these horrific events made Ashur think about how technology could make this safer.

“Construction is the biggest industry in the world, but right now, we have these three challenges,” Ashur said. “We have old infrastructure, the new infrastructure we’re building is growing, and finally, we have very few people willing to do the work. We needed to start developing drones and robots to bridge that gap.”

Lucid Bots was founded in 2018 and began as a cleaning company that hired contractors to learn more about the industry. After two years, and burning a few chemicals, Ashur said he knew what his drone needed to be successful.

Sales of Lucid Bots have grown significantly recently. It took five years to sell 100 units and is now approaching 1,000.

The company continues to improve its bots and drones in an effort to keep sales going. The data collected by the robots is fed back to the underlying software, which is used to process all Lucid Bots products. The company is also developing a tool that will allow its bots to be used in related fields such as painting, waterproofing and printing, among others.

“We recently shut down a large university campus that was getting old, still using the Sherpa-like brain and frame,” Ashur said. “Part of what we went through was that our existing customers were pulling us in there and we were getting, gosh, maybe 50 or more a month related to paint and coatings and that was before we started marketing the process.”