Lucid Bots' customers have now flown the company's Sherpa drone for a full calendar year. Not one drone, of course. The connected fleet passed 8,760 cumulative flight hours on August 17, measured by telemetry across more than 600 Sherpas. The company announced the milestone on September 1 alongside the launch of Power Tether, a system that powers the drone from the ground so crews no longer have to land and swap batteries mid-job.
Who’s flying all those hours
The Sherpa is a cleaning drone. It washes windows, facades and other building exteriors from the air, work that has traditionally meant swing stages, lifts and people hanging off the side of buildings. Lucid Bots doesn't run the jobs itself. It sells to operators, the cleaning and building-maintenance companies that put the drone to work, and that network now counts more than 400 operators in 40+ states and three continents.
That's why flight time is the right number to watch. An hour in the air is an hour a customer spends on a building doing paid work. Andrew Ashur, the company's founder and CEO, said as much: "Those hours belong to our customers." When Lucid Bots closed its $20 million Series B in March, it reported that operators had generated more than $75 million in exterior cleaning revenue with its equipment.
Taking the battery off the clock
Batteries are the constraint on any working drone. When a pack runs low, the crew lands, swaps it, relaunches and finds its place on the building again. On a large facade that cycle repeats all day, and none of it is cleaning.
Power Tether moves the power source to the ground. An air module sits in the Sherpa's battery bay, and a cable runs down to a ground station connected to a generator. Lucid Bots says it installs in under 15 minutes. Firmware tracks power draw in real time and warns the operator as the drone nears its limits, and a backup battery lands the drone automatically if generator power is lost. In a test at the company's Charlotte headquarters, a tethered Sherpa stayed airborne for eight hours and 48 seconds on one generator connection. No swaps.
The adoption number
Launch specs are one thing. Usage is the better test. Among customers who have logged more than an hour on Power Tether, more than 90% of their flight time now runs on tether power, with batteries covering the rest. "Once customers try it, the data shows they don't go back to swapping packs," Ashur said. The company is aiming it at long commercial jobs: facades, windows, hotels, institutional buildings and distribution centers.
Our view
We first invested in Lucid Bots nearly four years ago, and what drew us then still holds. This is a company that measures itself on job-site results. It designs and builds its hardware in Charlotte and sells to working businesses that need the drone to pay for itself. A year of cumulative flight time is a customer number: hours that cleaning companies chose to spend in the air with a Lucid Bots drone.
Power Tether follows the same logic. It removes the most repetitive interruption in an operator's day, and the adoption data says operators noticed. We like hardware companies that improve their customers' economics before they chase new headlines, and Lucid Bots keeps doing that.
Source: Lucid Bots press release · September 1, 2026 ↗
About Lucid Bots: a Charlotte, N.C.-based drone hardware manufacturer that designs and builds the Sherpa Drone for exterior cleaning and protection work. Lucid Bots is backed by Y Combinator and serves more than 400 operators across 40+ states and three continents.
Fleet, performance and adoption figures are as reported by Lucid Bots in the source release above; Series B figures are from the company's March 25, 2026 release. This insight is provided for information purposes only and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy securities, nor investment advice.