Window-Washing Drone Startup Lucid Bots Raises $20M

Lucid Bots Drones just closed a $20 million Series B to keep up with demand it says it can’t fulfill fast enough. For a company that spent five years selling its first 100 robots, that’s a different kind of problem.

The Charlotte, North Carolina company makes the Sherpa cleaning drone and the Lavo ground robot, both sold to commercial cleaning operators who use them on building exteriors, windows, and facades.

The Series B was co-led by Cubit Capital and Idea Fund Partners, bringing total funding to $34 million, as reported by TechCrunch. The company plans to use the capital for headcount and manufacturing capacity.

From 100 Units to Nearly 1,000

Lucid Bots launched in 2018 as a cleaning contractor, taking jobs to understand the industry before building anything. That hands-on apprenticeship, including what founder and CEO Andrew Ashur described as “a few cleaning chemical burns,” shaped the product. The company designed and manufactures its robots in the U.S.

It took five years to ship the first 100 units. The company is now approaching 1,000. As of early 2026, more than 400 active operators run the Sherpa across more than 40 states. Those operators have collectively generated more than $75 million in revenue from drone cleaning services, according to the company.

Ashur credits the momentum to a market with three compounding pressures: aging infrastructure, buildings that are getting bigger and harder to maintain, and a shrinking labor pool willing to do high-risk exterior work. “We needed to start building drones and robots to bridge that gap,” he told TechCrunch.

The Sherpa Drone: What It Actually Does

The Sherpa is a hexacopter, meaning it runs on six motors, each delivering up to 26.5 lbs of thrust. The airframe is built from stainless steel and aluminum with IPX5 water resistance, which matters when you’re flying a pressure washer into a building facade.

On battery power, the Sherpa flies up to 19 minutes and covers more than 300 square feet per minute, roughly 5,700 square feet per flight. It can operate untethered up to 400 feet above ground. When connected to a ground hose, FAA rules cap altitude at 140 feet.

The system handles wind up to 18 mph and operates the sprayer at up to 4,500 PSI for high-pressure work, though 300 PSI is the recommended setting for most window cleaning jobs.

Lucid recently demonstrated a power tether configuration that kept the Sherpa airborne for over an hour of continuous cleaning at 3,500 PSI, eliminating the battery swap rhythm that interrupts conventional drone cleaning operations.

The controller uses a built-in Android system with an LCD touchscreen and a transmission range of about 9.3 miles, well beyond any practical jobsite need. FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot certification is required for commercial operation.

Pricing starts at $2,500 per month through the company’s Refresh subscription program. A direct purchase with the window cleaning payload runs higher.

Beyond Windows

The company isn’t limiting itself to glass. Lucid Bots is building a tool attachment system that extends the Sherpa platform into painting, waterproofing, and sealing work. Ashur said the expansion came from the customer base pulling the company in that direction, not from a strategic pivot.

“We recently waterproofed a massive university stadium that was starting to age, still using the same brain and frame as a Sherpa,” he said. The company was already fielding roughly 50 inbound leads per month on painting and coating before it started marketing those services.

The data loop also matters here. Information collected by the robots feeds back into the underlying software, which Lucid uses to improve both products. That’s the full-stack model: hardware, software, and operational data all developed in-house.

DroneXL’s Take

Strip away the press release language, and what you’ve got here is a company that did the work nobody wanted to do before building the product. Ashur started a cleaning company, got chemicals on his hands, and figured out what the drone actually needed to be. That’s the right order of operations, and it shows in the numbers.

The trajectory from 100 units in five years to nearly 1,000 units with a full order backlog is what real product-market fit looks like. The drone industry has plenty of companies with polished demos and investor decks. Lucid Bots has operators in 40 states with dirty equipment and profitable routes. That’s a harder thing to fake.

Photo credit: Lucid Bots