Lucid Bots

Lucid Bots Inc. is a Charlotte, North Carolina-based robotics company that designs, manufactures and supports autonomous systems for exterior cleaning and building maintenance. Its flagship product is the Sherpa cleaning and spraying drone, used for window washing, facade cleaning and soft-washing at heights of up to 140 feet, with coverage of over 300 square feet per minute. The Sherpa has been extended to spray sealing and coating additives as well as paint, and can be equipped with a power tether that removes the onboard battery for unlimited flight time, additional payload capacity and improved efficiency. A second product line, Lavo AI, is a ground-based autonomous pressure-washing robot designed for unattended operation on sidewalks, driveways and parking lots, with its own mobile app and cloud data layer. Lucid Command provides fleet management software across the equipment.

The company describes itself as a full-stack AI robotics business: it engineers, manufactures and supports its products domestically at a 25,000-square-foot facility in Charlotte, a footprint it says supports compliance with federal mandates for US-built robotic systems and demand from government and commercial buyers. All Lucid equipment shares a common data layer; the company states its systems have logged hundreds of thousands of hours of real-world cleaning across building types, surfaces, weather conditions and job configurations, and that this dataset trains the AI embedded in its robots. Lucid Bots is a member of the NVIDIA Inception Program and develops its AI and autonomy capabilities in partnership with NVIDIA. In July 2024 it acquired Avianna, an AI company whose technology lets robots understand human language and operate autonomously, enabling voice and chat interaction with the Sherpa drone.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Andrew Ashur conceived the idea as a junior at Davidson College studying economics and Spanish, after walking past a building where window washers' swing stage was being knocked against the facade on a windy day. Founded in 2018, the company initially aimed to adapt off-the-shelf drones for exterior soft-washing and operated as a cleaning company taking contract jobs to learn the industry. After about two years it concluded the drone it needed did not exist and began building a purpose-built system from scratch.

Business model

Lucid Bots sells robots, software and support infrastructure to professional cleaning contractors who perform exterior cleaning jobs. Alongside outright equipment purchase, the company offers Lucid Refresh, a robotics-as-a-service subscription that bundles the Sherpa drone, the Lavo AI pressure-washing robot, Lucid Command fleet management software, operator training, job intelligence and an equipment loaner guarantee into a single ongoing subscription, so operators can take on jobs without a capital purchase. The company also runs an online store, an academy and a knowledge base supporting operators.

Revenue comes from sales of robotic hardware (Sherpa drones, Lavo AI robots and options such as the power tether, which drew nearly $1 million in pre-orders) and from recurring subscription fees under the Lucid Refresh RaaS platform covering equipment, software, training and support.

Traction

As of the March 2026 Series B announcement, nearly 1,000 robots were in active operator hands, up from 100 units to nearly 700 in less than five months; it had taken the company five years to sell its first 100 units. The operator network has generated more than $75 million in exterior cleaning revenue using Lucid systems. The company says it generated as much revenue in 2025 as in its first seven years combined, that 93% of new business is inbound, that the Sherpa reduces job completion time by two to five times with operator payback periods of under two months, and that the power tether option drew nearly $1 million in pre-orders. Its site cites over 400 active operators across more than 40 US states and approximately 70 employees.

Latest developments

In March 2026 Lucid Bots announced an oversubscribed $20 million Series B co-led by Cubit Capital and Idea Fund Partners, with participation from Taylor Rhodes, WaterStone Impact Fund, Front Porch Ventures and existing investors, bringing total funding to $34 million. Proceeds are earmarked for commercial operations, hiring, expanded Charlotte manufacturing capacity and the rollout of the Lucid Refresh RaaS platform. Around the same period the company launched Lavo AI, added power-tether and paint/coating spraying capabilities to the Sherpa, and said it is building tools to extend its robots into adjacent categories such as painting, waterproofing and sealing, citing roughly 50 inbound leads a month for coating work and a completed waterproofing project on a university stadium.