Andrew Ashur, 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 try to build humanoids or advertise their demos robots that dance and do flipsLucid Bots drones are out in the field making traditionally unsexy and dangerous work like cleaning windows safer and more efficient.
“The sad truth is that most people are still selling a lot of hype and headlines, and we’re selling workplace performance that shows up to our customers, our P&L,” Ashur told TechCrunch. “We’re not just in the lab and the simulators. We’ve got dirt under our fingernails and we’re out on construction sites to get the job 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 jobs. The company designs and manufactures its own robots in the US and just raised a $20 million Series B round, led by Cubit Capital and Idea Fund Partners. That brings its total funding to $34 million.
The company plans to use the money for hiring to keep up with demand, though Ashur joked that they’ve run out of parking spaces at their manufacturing facility.
“We have more requests for demonstrations than we have hours in the day, so we have to increase capacity and the number of people,” 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 wasn’t there to begin with, Ashur said. It took the company half a decade to ship its first 100 robots, and it took a lot of convincing to get VCs to back a robotics founder with a liberal arts background and no robotics experience.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, California
|
13-15 October 2026
Ashur got the initial idea for the company while a student at Davidson College studying economics and Spanish. He happened to pass a building being cleaned by window washers. It was a windy day, and the workers’ swing tent began to bang and bang against the building.
Watching the harrowing scene made Ashur think about how technology could make it safer.
“Built infrastructure is literally the largest asset class in the world, but right now, we have these three compounding issues,” Ashur said. “We have aging infrastructure, the new infrastructure we’re building is getting harder and harder to maintain, and finally, we have fewer and fewer people willing and able to do the work. We needed to start building drones and robots to bridge that gap.”
Lucid Bots launched in 2018 and started as a cleaning company that took on contracts to learn more about the industry. After two years and a few chemical cleaning burns, Ashur said they knew what their drone needed to be successful.
Lucid Bots sales have been on the rise recently. It took the startup 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 up sales. The data collected by the bots is fed back to the underlying software, which is used to improve both Lucid Bots products. The company is also building a tool that will allow its bots to be used for adjacent categories such as painting, sealing and sealing, among others.
“We recently waterproofed a huge university stadium that was starting to age, still using the same brain and frame as Sherpa,” Ashur said. “Part of why we went there was because our existing customers were pulling us there and we were getting, oh my gosh, probably about 50 inbound customers a month related to painting and coating and that was before we even started promoting that option.”
