The Boring Industry Robots Are Quietly Taking Over with Andrew Ashur

John begins by introducing Andrew Ashur as the founder of Lucid Bots, a robotics company focused on building maintenance. Ashur’s opening contrarian belief is that “there’s no substitute for experience” is not always true for entrepreneurs: high agency can be a substitute. In his view, a person with high agency can notice a problem, take action, and participate in solving it even without prior expertise. He says that was his own path: after seeing people nearly die while cleaning buildings, he became determined to find a safer way, taught himself mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, and entered robotics without a technical background. The conversation then frames the central opportunity as a hidden labor crisis in skilled trades and property services. Ashur says more than half of the construction-trades workforce is expected to retire within the next decade, while the cleaning industry often experiences annual turnover above 200 percent. He adds that real estate and property services represent the world’s largest asset market, worth more than the stock and bond markets combined, and that all those buildings still require maintenance. His conclusion is that the work will have to be done by someone—or increasingly, by systems that help a smaller and older workforce do it.

John asks why Ashur pursued robotics at a time when founders were rushing toward software and artificial intelligence. Ashur says the decision was not based on a forecast that physical products would eventually matter more than software. Instead, it arose naturally from the product requirement: Lucid Bots needed reliable mechanical and electrical systems to build a drone that could clean buildings. The best software in the world would not matter if the physical machine failed, so the company concentrated on the physical platform early. Ashur says the current AI era is useful because it accelerates Lucid Bots’ software work, but the physical world remains the limiting factor. Reliable robotic systems have to function in messy, real environments, and that requires excellence in hardware. He then recounts the company’s unusually modest beginning. While in college, he ran his own cleaning company, sold jobs door to door, and used a $2,000 Toyota Corolla as his first work vehicle. For an early job, he pulled trash cans filled with water and cleaning chemicals from the Corolla’s back seat, then attached them to a drone to clean a roof. He had no engineering background, so he learned through books, blogs, YouTube videos, and repeated work at job sites. The operating principle was simple: people should not die cleaning buildings, and buildings still need to be cleaned.

John asks when Ashur knew Lucid Bots was ready to raise a Series B and scale toward the $75 million in value the company now generates for operators. Ashur answers by describing the first investment rather than giving a conventional fundraising timeline. At one point, he had only $42 in his bank account, while his friends were preparing to return to college and he had already left. An investor he had been pitching called and invited him to Chicago to present in person, but Ashur did not have enough money for the trip. He went door-to-door around Davidson looking for work and obtained a job from one of his former Spanish professors. That money covered a flight to Chicago, where he received Lucid Bots’ first investment: a $25,000 check. The investor, whom Ashur describes as a world-class CEO, told him that “giving software a body” was one of the largest opportunities of their generation—and that this was exactly what Ashur was doing. Ashur says that investment changed his belief that the company could become something bigger. From there, the company kept showing up on job sites, improving the product, and eventually began helping other companies integrate the technology into their own operations. As the business demonstrated scale and success, investors became increasingly interested, leading to the Series B stage.

Ashur says the broad opportunity is “giving software a body,” including applications involving drones and robots. In Lucid Bots’ particular market—drone cleaning—he believes adoption is still at the top of the first inning. There are many buildings that need cleaning and painting, so the market remains open. He cautions that drone cleaning is not for every entrepreneur: it requires someone willing to sell and market, work in the field, and “get dirt under their fingernails.” The opportunity is for operators prepared to get involved rather than merely observe the technology. John points out that automation is often interpreted as replacing workers, but Ashur says Lucid Bots defines its mission as “extending human reach.” The robot is not intended to replace human touch; it is meant to unlock opportunities and make people more capable. He gives two customer examples. One pilot has only one hand but learned to fly a drone with that hand, allowing him to do work he could not traditionally perform. Another worker had undergone hip replacement and could no longer climb ladders, lifts, or scaffolding, but could sit or stand as a drone pilot throughout the day. Ashur says the technology can extend careers and change workers’ identities: instead of telling their children they spent the day with a squeegee, they can say they are drone operators working with robotics.

When John asks what Ashur might pursue if Lucid Bots suddenly disappeared, Ashur describes a closely related services business. He would build a robotics-centered company that helps businesses integrate and adopt different kinds of robots, including cleaning drones and interior-cleaning robots. He sees property services as durable because the work is recurring, buildings are aging and becoming larger, and fewer people are available to maintain them. For him, a growing gap between required maintenance and available labor is a strong signal of opportunity. Ashur’s practical playbook begins with leaving the laboratory: “Problems are solved on a job site, not in the lab.” Entrepreneurs should observe what is breaking, what is inefficient, and where a robot could make the work better. The next filter is transformative return on investment. He criticizes “robot theater,” such as a humanoid that walks around and places a plate on a table, because the activity creates little value. By contrast, a robot can be worthwhile even before it is fully autonomous if it makes a job three times faster, five times better, or substantially safer. He recommends looking for applications with high economic and safety impact that are technically accessible enough to deploy. His broader lesson is that founders may be called crazy for a long time: in 2017, drone cleaning sounded insane, whereas by 2026 Ashur says it could seem crazy for a cleaning company not to have a drone.