Lucid Bots Expands Drone Platform Beyond Cleaning to Include Painting and Coating

Student’s vision turns into drone cleaning startup

The inspiration needed to start a successful company can come in many forms.

For Andrew Ashur, CEO of Lucid Bots, a manufacturer of cleaning drones and related equipment, inspiration struck when as a junior at Davidson College in North Carolina, he spotted a crew of window washers whose platform was being buffeted by high winds.

“As they were hanging on for dear life, I just thought to myself, ‘Why hasn’t anybody found a way to make this job safer?’” Ashur said in an interview. It was then that he formed the idea to launch Lucid Bots, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based aerial robotics company whose drones are deployed to wash buildings and infrastructure such as towers and bridges across the United States and 18 other countries.

Ashur began researching the perils of window washing and discovered that the job was much more hazardous than he had at first realized.

“About once every four days, somebody dies cleaning a building, and I think that shouldn’t have to happen when we’ve got technology that can send people to outer space,” he said. He also learned about the huge global demand for exterior cleaning services.

“I also realized real estate is the largest asset class in the world. It’s worth more than all stock and bond markets put together,” Ashur said. “If we want that infrastructure to retain value, we have to make sure it’s well-maintained with proper cleaning, painting and coating.”

Although as a liberal arts student studying economics and Spanish, he had no background in robotics, he decided to launch a company that produced flying robots, drones, to take on the job that was so dangerous for human workers.

While still a student, and working in collaboration with the Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Davidson College, Ashur and his team launched Lucid Bots in 2018. With backing from Y Combinator, a start-up incubator, and $34 million in venture capital funding, in a few short years the company has grown to employ about 80 people.

It serves more than 400 customers located in more than 40 states and three continents. Several weeks ago, Lucid Bots announced that in addition to producing spraying drones, it would launch the manufacture of the Power Tether to supply a ground source of continuous electricity to UAVs. The company, which currently produces about 25 spraying drones per month, also is ramping up production to manufacture an equal number of power tethers per month, Ashur said.

Brain, frames and tools

As a manufacturing company, Lucid Bots provides its customers the tools needed to replace the expensive and dangerous exterior washing programs based on human labor, with cheaper and more efficient UAVs.

“The way we describe our product today is across three layers: brain, frames and tools,” Ashur said.

“On the brain layer, that’s essentially our universal software stack that works across any type of robot frame.”

The frame is the company’s flagship product, the Sherpa Drone, a purpose-built commercial cleaning drone capable of washing building exteriors up to heights of 150 feet. The Sherpa supports three cleaning methods: soft washing for delicate surfaces such as stucco, pressure washing for concrete and brick and — with an optional payload attachment — window cleaning.

“To start, we focused on this industrial drone, the Sherpa, and when we build this frame, our goal was to make it highly modular, both mechanically and electrically, so that we can attach any kind of tool to it,” Ashur said.

On the tool side of the equation, Lucid Bots has expanded its product line beyond the set of tools it had introduced for exterior cleaning. The company now offers a new tool, the Shield Payload, that allows the user to spray coating materials to waterproof surfaces.

“Now we’re in the late stage of development and deployment with a painting payload,” Ashur said. Recently a customer used the tool to paint a very large newly constructed warehouse. In another use case, Lucid Bots is working with a local highway system in North Carolina that is using the Shield Payload to paint over graffiti on highway bridges.

“Where we want to expand is taking this platform, the universal brain and that modular frame of the Sherpa, and continue to build new tools around it that help our customers generate more and more value and more revenue,” he said.

Focus on supply chain dynamics

Given the rapidly evolving nature of the commercial UAV market, Ashur sees being a U.S.-based drone manufacturer as a distinct advantage toward driving the company’s growth.

“As you’ve probably seen with the ever-evolving legislation, we’re becoming harsher and harsher toward importing different drones from other countries, and there’s a lot of focus on manufacturing in the United States,” he said.

“When we first started manufacturing in the United States, people probably thought we were a little bit crazy, and now in 2026, it’s become very evident that if you want to be competitive in the drone space in the years to come, you really need to build locally.”

Just like every other U.S.-based drone producer, Lucid Bots puts a great deal of emphasis on establishing a secure, reliable supply chain to furnish the company with the parts and components needed to maintain its business.

“We joke internally that we’ve made supply chain our love language, and we have people internally whose whole entire job is procurement, vendor management, supply-chain management,” Ashur said.

He added that every supply chain, including his company’s, carries with it the potential risk of disruption.

“We just try to have less risk in ours versus other people in our industry. And the two ways we do that, number one is with having a full-stack engineering team so that if there’s ever a component shortage or we need to swap to a different part, we have all engineering disciplines across electrical, mechanical, software engineering to quickly scope in new products as needed,” he said.

The second way in which the company works to de-risk its supply chain is to maintain a deep network of vendors. “We make sure that we don’t have any single-threaded dependencies for critical components and that we have a robust ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] system internally with quality minimum order quantities.”