Lucid Bots secures $9M for drones to clean more than your windows
Cleaning the outside of buildings is a dirty job, and itâs also dangerous. Lucid Bots came on the scene in 2018 with its Sherpa line of drones to clean windows in tall places, and now itâs back to take on more labor-intensive tasks.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based company, which was part of Y Combinator's 2019 cohort, took on a new form as a robotics company with a thesis to build intelligent robots that are purpose-made to tackle the âdirtyâ jobs that people donât want to do, Ashur said.
âWe started with a very simple problem, and in pursuit of wanting to make a dangerous job safer over the years, the true problem we're solving is this fundamental fact that people don't want to do jobs that are considered dull, dirty, dangerous or demeaning,â Andrew Ashur, founder and CEO of Lucid Bots, told TechCrunch.
Customers, too, kept asking the company if its drones had the ability to clean flat surfaces, like sidewalks and driveways, in addition to the building facade, window and roof.
âWe had this inverse problem where people are telling us, âIf you build this, we will pay you for it,ââ Ashur said. âAs you can imagine for a flying object, a flat surface and gravity are not friendly.â
Achieving a robot to do that was actually easier than Ashur thought. Lucid Bots had a common frame and common brain to its robots. All that was missing was attaching different tools or payloads to the robots so they can do different tasks. Well, and some wheels. Voila: a robot that can clean a flat surface. Itâs called Lavo Bot, a pressure-washing robot.
Drones are an industry where some big players...fly in. Amazon has a lock on delivery drones, even though it is not going to deliver in California anymore. Google and DoorDash also tried to get in on that. There's also all of the drones being used for aerospace and military purposes. In addition to Lucid Bots, some lesser-known companies, like Apellix, Prichard Industries and KTV have cleaning drones. Ashurâs goal isnât to necessarily compete with the likes of Amazon â it isnât focused on delivery, but rather âbuilding frontier technology for old school industries,â he said.
Where Ashur believes Lucid Bots has an edge is that cleaning drones fly within regulations in urban and suburban environments, spaces where delivery drones can't even test today, Ashur said.
Last year, Lucid Bots did a proof-of-concept where a customer paid for two delivery drones of a certain size â a 20-pound payload lifting delivery drone that can fly 10 kilometers autonomously. Lucid Bots looked at its core tech stack and product strategy and realized it could pull that off in less than a month. In fact, the company ended up doing it in four days, Ashur said.
âWeâre like an outlier in the robotics landscape,â Ashur said. âWe're doing meaningful revenue. We've got years of growth. We've also got access to this very unique data set of how you can fly in these environments where most drones aren't able to fly today, which creates a lot of long term value for us.â
Meanwhile, Lucid Bots did just over $3.5 million in revenue in 2023, with Ashur saying the company âhas been on an exponential clip for the last three years, and I plan to stay on that for as long as we can.â
Now it wants to advance its portfolio of autonomous robotics, scale operations and leverage its AI-driven software and sensor platform to expand into new markets. Itâs doing that with a new $9.1M in Series A funding.
It was âvery interestingâ trying to fundraise for a frontier tech company, especially based out of Charlotte, Ashur said. There was often a disconnect between investors who didnât understand the space or the vision of what Lucid Bots was building toward. That was not the case with Cubit Capital, he said.
Cubit Capital led the round and was joined by Idea Fund Partners, Danu Venture Group and existing investors, including Y Combinatorâs Growth Fund and Gratus Capital.
Cubit Capitalâs Philip Carson said in a written statement that Lucid Bots was able to achieve something âunheard of in the cleaning robotics industry,â bring products to market quickly and cost-consciously.
âLucid Bots has pioneered a model where it costs less to build a drone domestically than it would to ship a drone from a manufacturer overseas,â Carson said. âThese differentiated capabilities, combined with strong revenue growth and a proven team, bring us immense confidence in their ability to win in this exciting, growing market.â