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 tout demos of their robots dancing and doing flips, Lucid Bots’ drones are out in the field making traditionally unsexy and dangerous work, like cleaning windows, safer and more efficient.
“The sad truth is most are still selling a lot of hype and headlines, and we sell performance on the job site that shows up in our customers, profits, and losses,” Ashur told TechCrunch. “We’re not just in the lab and simulators. We’ve got dirt under our fingernails, and we’re out on job sites getting work done.”
Charlotte, North Carolina-based Lucid Bots 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 U.S. 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’ve run out of parking spots at their manufacturing facility.
“We have more requests for demos than we have hours in the day, so we need to scale up capacity and head count,” 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 bit of heartburn.”
Demand from customers and investors wasn’t 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 founder with a liberal arts background and no robotics experience.
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Ashur got the original idea for the company while he was a junior at Davidson College studying economics and Spanish. He happened to walk by a building that was being cleaned by window washers. It was a windy day, and the workers’ swing stage started to knock around and slam into the building.
Watching the harrowing scene made Ashur think about how technology could make this safer.
“Built infrastructure is literally the largest asset class in the world, but right now, we’ve got these three compounding issues,” Ashur said. “We’ve got aging infrastructure, the new infrastructure we’re building is getting bigger and harder to maintain, and, last but not least, we have less and less people willing and able to do the work. We needed to start building drones and robots to bridge that gap.”
Lucid Bots was launched in 2018 and started out as a cleaning company that took contract jobs to learn more about the industry. After two years, and a few cleaning chemical burns, Ashur said they knew what their drone needed to be successful.
Lucid Bots’ sales has gained momentum recently. It took the startup five years to sell 100 units and now it is approaching 1,000.
The company continues to improve its bots and drones in an effort to keep sales ticking along. Data collected by the robots is fed back to the underlying software, which is used to improve both of Lucid Bots’ products. The company is also building a tool that will allow its bots to be used for adjacent categories like painting, waterproofing, and sealing, among others.
“We recently waterproofed a massive university stadium that was starting to age, still using the same brain and frame as a Sherpa,” Ashur said. “Part of why we went there is because our existing customers were pulling us there and we were getting, gosh, probably about 50 or so inbound leads a month related to painting and coating and that was before we even began marketing that option.”
