Lucid Bots, a U.S.-based robotics company, has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round. The round was co-led by Cubit Capital and Idea Fund Partners. With this, the company’s total funding has reached $34 million.
The company plans to use the fresh capital to expand its workforce and increase production capacity. This comes as demand for its robotic cleaning solutions continues to rise.
Founded by Andrew Ashur, Lucid Bots focuses on solving real-world industrial challenges. Unlike many robotics firms that highlight experimental or humanoid designs, the company develops drones for tasks such as window cleaning.
“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.”
The company builds and sells its Sherpa drones and Lavo robots to cleaning service providers. It also designs and manufactures these systems within the United States.
Demand for Lucid Bots’ products has increased in recent years. As a result, the company is scaling its operations to meet growing customer interest.
“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.”
This demand marks a shift from the company’s early years. Initially, Lucid Bots faced challenges in attracting both customers and investors.
Ashur founded the company in 2018 after observing safety risks in manual window cleaning. While studying at Davidson College, he saw workers struggling to clean a building in windy conditions. The incident highlighted the need for safer alternatives.
“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.”
In its early phase, the company operated as a cleaning service provider. This helped the team understand industry requirements before building its robotic systems.
Lucid Bots has gradually improved its products based on real-world usage data. The company collects operational data from its robots and uses it to refine both hardware and software.
Sales have also accelerated. It took the company five years to sell its first 100 units. However, it is now approaching 1,000 units sold.
In addition, the company is exploring new use cases for its technology. These include applications such as painting, waterproofing, and sealing.
“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.”
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