Gecko Robotics is a United States robotics and software company that builds wall-climbing and other mobile robots to inspect heavy industrial infrastructure, and pairs them with an artificial-intelligence software platform, Cantilever, that turns the inspection data into digital models of an asset's condition. Founded in 2013 by Jake Loosararian (CEO) and Troy Demmer, the company is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a second major office in Boston.[3] Its robots and sensors gather large volumes of structural data from tanks, boilers, pressure vessels, pipes, power-plant equipment, naval ships and other built structures, and Cantilever uses that data to predict failures and help operators move from reactive, scheduled maintenance toward predictive, condition-based maintenance. By 2025 Gecko had become a defense-and-infrastructure technology firm valued at roughly $1.25 billion, with the U.S. Navy, large energy operators and industrial manufacturers among its customers.[10][11]

Gecko Robotics is not a humanoid-robot company. It makes industrial inspection robots (which climb, fly, swim and roll) together with analytics software. It is distinct from academic research into gecko-inspired dry adhesion and from unrelated consumer brands that use the name "Gecko."

History

Founding

Jake Loosararian started Gecko Robotics in May 2013, growing the idea out of a senior engineering project at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.[3] The original problem was the dangerous and slow way that power plants inspect boilers: human workers erect scaffolding inside a cooled boiler and manually take ultrasonic thickness readings, a process that keeps the plant offline for long stretches and exposes workers to hazardous, confined spaces. Loosararian's answer was a magnetic-wheeled robot that could climb the boiler walls and take far more readings, far faster, while people stayed on the ground.

The company was accepted into the Y Combinator Winter 2016 batch (YC W16).[2] Around that time Loosararian brought on co-founders to build out the business, with Troy Demmer becoming a co-founder and long-serving executive (later chief growth officer / co-founder spokesperson). Sources differ on exactly how to count the founding team: some early company material and profiles credit additional early collaborators, but Loosararian and Demmer are the two people consistently described as Gecko's co-founders. By the end of the Y Combinator program Gecko reported about $1 million in purchase orders from customers.[2]

Funding

Gecko raised through a series of venture rounds, shifting from a niche inspection-robotics startup toward a billion-dollar infrastructure and defense technology company. The table below lists the rounds that are publicly documented.

Round	Date	Amount	Valuation	Lead / notable investors
Series C	March 2022	$73 million	$533 million post-money	Led by XN; with Founders Fund, XYZ Venture Capital, Drive Capital, Snowpoint Ventures, plus Mark Cuban, Joe Lonsdale and Gokul Rajaram[6]
Series C extension	December 5, 2023	$100 million (Series C total $173 million)	$633 million	US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT) and Founders Fund added board seats[7][8]
Series D	June 12, 2025	$125 million	$1.25 billion	Led by Cox Enterprises; with USIT, XN, Founders Fund and Y Combinator[10][11]

The 2023 Series C extension explicitly funded a push into defense. As part of it, Gecko added Gaetano Crupi of USIT and Trae Stephens of Founders Fund (also co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries) to its board, and framed the money as a way to "supercharge" work on assets the U.S. military relies on.[7][8]

The June 2025 Series D, led by the family-owned conglomerate Cox Enterprises, doubled the company's valuation to about $1.25 billion and made Gecko a "unicorn" roughly twelve years after Loosararian started it.[11] Reported total funding after the round was about $347 million.[12] Gecko was named to CNBC's Disruptor 50 list in both 2024 and 2025.

How it works

Gecko's model is sometimes described as robotics-as-a-service: rather than selling robots outright, it deploys robots and crews to gather data and sells the resulting condition analytics through software. The workflow has three layers, hardware, data capture and the Cantilever software platform.

Robots and sensors

Gecko's best-known machines are the TOKA series of wall-climbing robots, which use magnetic wheels to drive up the steel walls of tanks, boilers and similar structures while carrying ultrasonic and other sensor payloads. Variants reported include TOKA 3 and TOKA 4 for large tank and vessel surfaces, TOKA 4 GZ for high-temperature or hazardous zones, and TOKA Flex for narrow piping with an articulating chassis; a separate MONARCH robot is described for confined vessel spaces.[4] The robots perform non-destructive testing: they measure wall thickness, pitting, corrosion and weld condition without cutting into or damaging the material, scanning carbon-steel equipment at speeds reported up to roughly 60 feet per minute and collecting on the order of a thousand times more data points than manual methods while running about ten times faster.[4] Sensor payloads can include phased-array and conventional ultrasound, eddy-current and acoustic sensors, high-definition cameras and LiDAR.

Beyond climbing robots, Gecko has expanded the kinds of machines it deploys. Company descriptions and partners refer to robots that "climb, fly, and swim," including drones and fixed (permanently mounted) sensors, and at least one quadruped "robot dog" platform for ground data collection. In September 2025 Gecko released StratoSight, a drone-based roof-inspection system developed with the power operator NAES that flies a custom payload over commercial rooftops to detect thermal loss, water intrusion and structural shifts using high-definition photogrammetry and thermography.[15] In May 2026 Gecko said it was evaluating Ouster's REV8 native-color LiDAR for next-generation inspection capabilities.[20]

Cantilever software

Cantilever is Gecko's software platform, launched on October 31, 2023.[9] It ingests inspection data from Gecko's robots, drones and fixed sensors, along with partner systems, historical maintenance and health records, design files, operational data and business metrics, and combines them into layered digital models of an asset (in effect, a digital twin of physical infrastructure). AI-driven analysis then estimates quantities such as corrosion rates and remaining useful life, scores risk, and produces maps that help operators prioritize repairs and capital spending. Gecko says the platform's predictive models have been informed by data from hundreds of thousands of assets. CEO Jake Loosararian has framed the ambition broadly, calling Cantilever "designed to become the primary operating system for the physical world."[9] The company markets outcomes such as cutting reactive maintenance and extending asset life, including a claim that the approach can reduce reactive maintenance by up to 80% and roughly double an asset's lifespan, and that it can help run a power plant at 3 to 5% greater efficiency.

Markets and customers

Gecko sells across three broad markets: energy and utilities, manufacturing, and defense and government. Its technology overlaps with the wider fields of robotics, the industrial robot sector and autonomous mobile robot systems, but its differentiator is the combination of mobile data collection with machine learning analytics on asset health.

Energy, industry and the power grid

Early customers were heavy-industry operators that run tanks, boilers and pressure vessels. Reported industrial and energy customers over the company's history include BP, Dow, Marathon, International Paper, Duke Energy and Siemens Energy. In February 2025 Gecko announced a partnership with NAES Corporation, the largest independent power-plant operator in the United States (with about 65 gigawatts under management and the second-largest fleet of power-generation assets in the country).[14] The initial multi-year agreement was valued at more than $100 million, with an option to grow beyond $250 million, and aimed to modernize aging power infrastructure amid rising electricity demand and a shrinking maintenance workforce.[14] In 2025 Gecko also announced work with U.S. Steel to explore AI- and robotics-driven analysis of steel-mill infrastructure,[22] and a set of agreements with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) in the United Arab Emirates (announced around November 2025) to deploy robotics and AI across ADNOC's operations and support local skills training.[21]

Defense and government

Defense and government became a central part of Gecko's business in the 2020s. The company has worked with the U.S. Navy on accelerating submarine and surface-ship maintenance, including inspection work tied to the Columbia-class submarine program, and with the U.S. Air Force on inspecting and modernizing strategic assets such as nuclear missile silos and aircraft (including C-130 work). It has also done inspection work for other federal bodies.

The largest publicly reported defense award came in March 2026, when the U.S. Navy (contracting through the General Services Administration) selected Gecko for a five-year, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with a ceiling of up to $71 million to use the company's ship-scaling robots and AI to find needed repairs across the fleet.[16][17][19] Under the deal, Gecko was to begin inspecting 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet, including destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships, over roughly the following nine months, gathering data on hulls, decks and welds without damaging protective coatings.[16] The company says its robots can identify repairs up to 50 times faster and more accurately than human inspectors.[16] The effort supports a Navy goal of raising combat-surge readiness toward about 80% by 2027, up from a 2025 baseline in which roughly 41% of ships completed repairs on time.[18] Co-founder Troy Demmer described the approach as "leveraging autonomy and AI to deploy technologies prior to a ship or submarine coming into a dry dock facility."[16]

Scale

Gecko Robotics is privately held. Third-party data providers have estimated its headcount in the low hundreds of employees (figures around 200 to 320 appear across different sources and dates) and its annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, but the company does not publish audited figures, so these estimates should be treated as approximate.[5] Pricing for individual robot deployments was reported in earlier coverage at roughly $50,000 to $100,000 per robot, though Gecko increasingly sells multi-year data-and-software programs rather than one-off robot rentals.[4]

References

"Gecko Robotics: AI + Robotics for the Built World." Y Combinator. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gecko-robotics
"Gecko Robotics (YC W16) Builds Robots to Automate Infrastructure Inspections." Y Combinator. https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/gecko-robotics-yc-w16-builds-robots-to-automate-infrastructure-inspections
"Gecko's founder built a $600 million robot company from a college project." Fortune, April 17, 2024. https://fortune.com/2024/04/17/gecko-founding-jake-loosararian-robots-infrastructure-environment-y-combinator/
"Report: Gecko Robotics's Business Breakdown & Founding Story." Contrary Research. https://research.contrary.com/company/gecko-robotics
"Gecko Robotics valuation, funding & news." Sacra. https://sacra.com/c/gecko-robotics/
"$73 million Series C Funding Will Bring Infrastructure Inspections Into the 21st Century." PR Newswire, March 2022. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/73-million-series-c-funding-will-bring-infrastructure-inspections-into-the-21st-century-301494634.html
"Gecko Robotics Raises $100 Million In Series C Extension to Grow Defense Business." Gecko Robotics, December 5, 2023. https://www.geckorobotics.com/news/gecko-robotics-raises-usd100-million-to-extend-its-series-c-funding-enabling
"Gecko Robotics raises $100M Series C extension, adds board members to intensify defense focus." The Robot Report, December 2023. https://www.therobotreport.com/gecko-robotics-raises-100m-series-c-extension-growing-defense-business/
"Gecko Robotics launches Cantilever platform." The Robot Report, October 2023. https://www.therobotreport.com/gecko-robotics-launches-cantilever-platform/
"Gecko Reaches Unicorn Status." Gecko Robotics, June 12, 2025. https://www.geckorobotics.com/news/gecko-reaches-unicorn-status
"Gecko Robotics raises $125 million in deal valuing critical infrastructure startup over $1 billion." CNBC, June 12, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/12/gecko-robotics-raises-125-million-surpassing-billion-dollar-valuation.html
"Gecko Robotics reaches a $1.25B valuation with new Series D." Technical.ly, June 2025. https://technical.ly/entrepreneurship/gecko-robotics-raises-125m-unicorn-valuation/
"Gecko Robotics reaches unicorn status with latest funding." The Robot Report, June 2025. https://www.therobotreport.com/gecko-robotics-reaches-unicorn-status-with-latest-funding/
"NAES and Gecko Robotics make $100M deal to modernize U.S. power grid with robots, AI." The Robot Report, February 28, 2025. https://www.therobotreport.com/naes-gecko-robotics-make-100m-deal-modernize-power-grid-robots-ai/
"Gecko Robotics releases StratoSight drone-based roof inspection system." The Robot Report, September 18, 2025. https://www.therobotreport.com/gecko-robotics-releases-stratosight-drone-based-roof-inspection-system/
"Navy taps Gecko Robotics for ship-scaling robots to identify repairs in Pacific Fleet." Breaking Defense, March 2026. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/03/navy-taps-gecko-robotics-for-ship-scaling-robots-to-identify-repairs-in-pacific-fleet/
"US Navy Awards Contract to Gecko Robotics to Inspect Ships." Bloomberg, March 17, 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-17/us-navy-awards-contract-to-gecko-robotics-to-inspect-ships
"US Navy to use wall-climbing robots to inspect ships." Defense One, March 2026. https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2026/03/us-navy-aims-use-robots-ai-reduce-ship-maintenance/412159/
"US Navy Awards Gecko Robotics $71M for AI-Driven Fleet Maintenance." The Defense Post, March 20, 2026. https://thedefensepost.com/2026/03/20/gecko-robotics-us-navy-maintenance/
"Gecko Robotics Explores Next-Generation Inspection Capabilities with Ouster's New REV8 Native Color Lidar." Business Wire, May 21, 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260521644746/en/Gecko-Robotics-Explores-Next-Generation-Inspection-Capabilities-with-Ousters-New-REV8-Native-Color-Lidar
"ADNOC and Gecko Robotics Sign Three Deals to Accelerate AI, Robotics and Skills Training." ADNOC, November 2025. https://www.adnoc.ae/en/news-and-media/press-releases/2025/adnoc-and-gecko-robotics-sign-three-deals-to-accelerate-ai-and-robotics-and-skills-training
"Gecko Robotics partners with U.S. Steel to explore AI-driven infrastructure analysis." Yahoo Finance / Gecko Robotics, 2025. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gecko-robotics-partners-u-steel-143659758.html

Editing: Gecko Robotics