Summary
Gecko Robotics builds autonomous wall-climbing, crawling, swimming, and flying robots equipped with ultrasonic and other sensors, paired with its AI-powered Cantilever platform, to inspect and maintain critical physical infrastructure. Its customers span energy, oil and gas, manufacturing, steel, mining, and pulp and paper industries, as well as the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Pittsburgh, the company reached unicorn status with a $1.25 billion valuation in June 2025.
Company Story
Gecko Robotics traces its origin to a 2012 visit Jake Loosararian made to a local power plant as an engineering student at Grove City College. He learned that a worker had recently died while trying to find structural defects in a boiler, and he returned to his dorm room to start building a robot that could climb walls while carrying ultrasonic sensors and cameras (Gecko Robotics: About Us). After the prototype successfully located a recurring defect on-site, Loosararian teamed up with his college roommate, Troy Demmer, and the two became co-founders of Gecko Robotics in 2013.
The company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch, becoming one of the accelerator’s first robotics companies (Gecko Robotics: About Us). Since then, Gecko has grown from industrial inspection into a broader AI-and-robotics platform business serving energy, manufacturing, and defense customers, culminating in a $1.25 billion valuation and an expanding set of U.S. military contracts.
Founders
Jake Loosararian co-founded Gecko Robotics in 2013 and serves as CEO. He built the company’s first wall-climbing inspection robot as an undergraduate engineering student after witnessing the safety and reliability problems of manual infrastructure inspection (Gecko Robotics: About Us).
Troy Demmer co-founded the company alongside Loosararian, his former college roommate, after working in the health sector building diagnostic tools. Demmer has been publicly associated with the company’s product and operations leadership.
Products
Gecko’s core products are a fleet of robots — wall-climbing, crawling, swimming, and flying — equipped with ultrasonic sensors and cameras that collect high-resolution physical data from hard-to-access infrastructure such as boilers, hulls, storage tanks, pipelines, and structural welds (Gecko Robotics: About Us).
That data feeds Cantilever, Gecko’s proprietary AI-powered software platform, which converts inspection data into digital twins of physical assets and helps customers move from reactive repairs to predictive maintenance (Navy IDIQ announcement). Cantilever is used across Gecko’s energy, industrial, and defense customer base, including the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet and submarine programs.
Funding
Gecko Robotics has raised approximately $347 million across five known priced rounds as of June 2025 (CNBC). The company raised a $7 million Series A in 2018 led by Founders Fund, followed by a $40 million Series B in December 2019 led by Drive Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Next47, and Y Combinator (PRNewswire).
In March 2022, Gecko announced a $73 million Series C led by XN at a $533 million post-money valuation (PRNewswire). That round was extended by an additional $100 million in December 2023, bringing the total Series C to $173 million at a $633 million valuation and adding board representation from US Innovative Technology Fund and Founders Fund (BusinessWire).
In June 2025, Gecko announced a $125 million Series D led by new investor Cox Enterprises, with continuing participation from US Innovative Technology Fund, XN, Founders Fund, and Y Combinator, doubling its valuation to $1.25 billion and giving the company unicorn status (Gecko Robotics: Gecko Reaches Unicorn Status).
Partnerships
Gecko Robotics has built an increasingly significant defense business alongside its commercial energy and industrial customers. In November 2022, the U.S. Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center awarded Gecko an 18-month, $1.5 million SBIR contract to integrate concrete evaluation technology into its crawling robots for assessing Minuteman III ICBM launch facilities ahead of the transition to the Sentinel missile program (BusinessWire).
Gecko has also worked with the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet since at least 2023, including on the Columbia-class submarine program. In March 2026, the Navy and GSA awarded Gecko a five-year, $71 million IDIQ contract — a government-wide vehicle usable by any military branch — to deploy inspection robots and the Cantilever platform across the Pacific Fleet, beginning with 18 ships, in support of a target of 80% fleet readiness by 2027 (Gecko Robotics: Navy IDIQ announcement; Breaking Defense).
Timeline
- 2013: Gecko Robotics founded in Pittsburgh by Jake Loosararian and Troy Demmer.
- 2016: Joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch.
- August 2018: Raised a $7 million Series A.
- December 2019: Raised a $40 million Series B led by Drive Capital.
- March 2022: Raised a $73 million Series C led by XN.
- November 2022: Awarded a $1.5 million U.S. Air Force SBIR contract to assess nuclear missile silo infrastructure.
- December 2023: Extended Series C by $100 million, reaching a $633 million valuation.
- June 2025: Raised a $125 million Series D led by Cox Enterprises, reaching a $1.25 billion valuation.
- March 2026: Awarded a five-year, $71 million U.S. Navy IDIQ contract for Pacific Fleet readiness.
Market Context
Gecko Robotics sits at the intersection of industrial inspection robotics and defense technology. Its closest peers include other companies building inspection and infrastructure-monitoring robots, but its expanding defense contracts with the U.S. Air Force and Navy also place it alongside defense-tech hardware and software companies. Gecko’s AI platform, Cantilever, differentiates it from pure hardware inspection vendors by combining robot-collected data with software for predictive maintenance and asset management.
Source Notes
This profile relies primarily on Gecko Robotics’ own company website and press releases, supplemented by reporting from CNBC, Bloomberg, Reuters-adjacent trade press (The Robot Report, Breaking Defense, SiliconANGLE), and funding announcements distributed via PRNewswire and BusinessWire. Total funding and round-by-round figures reflect publicly disclosed amounts; the company has not disclosed detailed revenue or profitability figures.