GECKO ROBOTICS

Jake Loosararian was a 19-year-old engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh when he and Troy Demmer built their first wall-climbing robot in 2016. They entered it in a startup competition and won.

The original idea was to inspect large industrial structures — power plant boilers, storage tanks, pressure vessels — that are traditionally inspected by humans who have to scaffold up, rope in, and visually examine surfaces in dangerous, confined environments. These inspections are slow, expensive, and sometimes deadly.

Gecko's robots could do the same inspection faster, safer, and with data precision that human eyes couldn't match. They quickly gained traction with power utilities and oil refineries.

Gecko sells inspection-as-a-service. They deploy their robots to industrial facilities, perform the inspection, and deliver a detailed digital report with 3D models and condition assessments.

Customers pay per inspection. They also license their Cantilever software platform, which aggregates inspection data into a "digital twin" of a facility, enabling predictive maintenance and compliance tracking.

Revenue comes from both government (Navy, Army Corps of Engineers) and commercial customers (power utilities, refineries, chemical plants).

Gecko's wall-climbing inspection robots use magnetic and vacuum adhesion to climb vertical and inverted surfaces. They carry ultrasonic thickness sensors, high-resolution cameras, and other instruments.

The Cantilever software platform creates facility-wide digital twins from inspection data. TOKA is their asset intelligence platform for predictive maintenance.

They've inspected thousands of facilities and billions of data points.

Gecko's growth strategy is vertical expansion and government contracts. They started with power plant boilers and expanded to storage tanks, pressure vessels, pipelines, and naval vessels.

The defense market has been transformative — the Navy has over 290 ships and thousands of facilities that need regular inspection. Gecko also built the Cantilever software platform to create recurring revenue from data analytics on top of one-time inspection services.

International expansion is the next frontier.

Scaling a robotics company is hard. Building, deploying, and maintaining fleets of robots requires capital and operational expertise.

Each industrial environment is different, requiring custom robot configurations. Competition from traditional inspection companies (some of which are adopting drones and robots themselves) and from other robotics startups is real.

The defense procurement process is slow and bureaucratic. And the robots need to work in extremely harsh environments — extreme heat, confined spaces, corrosive chemicals.

Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's fund) led the Series C, a significant endorsement. XYZ Venture Capital, Drive Capital, Mark Cuban, and Joe Lonsdale's 8VC have invested.

The US Department of Defense has been a crucial validator and customer. The Founders Fund investment signaled that defense tech VCs view Gecko as a core infrastructure company.