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, then 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 co …