Have you ever wondered how much it costs to clean a skyscraper’s windows?
Glass-fronted skyscrapers dominate the skylines of most major cities, and the need to keep them clean has fired the imagination of filmmakers for decades.
Usually, these steel and glass behemoths have winches on their roofs from which a carrier containing workers can be moved along the face of the building, moving down floor by floor; in older or smaller buildings, window cleaners are lowered directly on harnesses. This is tough work, and while safety has improved over time, it remains a dangerous, boring job that is also expensive: the market for cleaning skyscraper facades is estimated to be worth $40 billion globally. What’s more, like other low skill industries, the workforce is shrinking: 75% of all window cleaners in the United States are aged over 40, with only 9% in their twenties and thirties.
Now, Skyline Robotics, an Israeli company founded in 2017 that uses robots to clean skyscraper windows, has just raised $3.35 million (after a pre-series of $6.5 and a seed round of $2.5 more). Among the investors are power cleaner manufacturer Kärcher’s investment subsidiary. Skyline Robotics uses the Ozmo classic industrial robot, with its familiar orange three-dimensional articulated arm made by Germany’s Kuka Robots, which can clean glass facades efficiently and three three times faster than…
