Summary
Jake Loosararian is the co-founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that builds AI-powered inspection robots for critical infrastructure. He built the company’s first wall-climbing robot prototype as an undergraduate engineering student and has led Gecko as CEO since founding it in 2013, growing it into a unicorn valued at $1.25 billion.
Career
Loosararian was born in Columbia, Maryland, and grew up in the Washington, D.C. area; his father worked in a classified government role, and he was homeschooled by his mother before his family moved to the United Kingdom, where he finished secondary school (Forbes). He returned to the U.S. to study electrical engineering at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in 2013 (LinkedIn). While still a student, he co-founded the Team GCC Scholarship Endowment in 2011 and helped raise funds for the college by bicycling across the country from Seattle to New York.
As a student, Loosararian visited a local power plant and learned that frequent, unpredictable shutdowns of its boilers were costing the facility millions of dollars, and that inspections were performed dangerously by workers suspended from ropes at heights of up to 100 feet (Forbes). He built a wall-climbing robot carrying ultrasonic sensors and cameras as a senior design project under Grove City College’s VentureLab program, and it successfully identified a recurring structural issue at the plant (Gecko Robotics: About Us).
Loosararian co-founded Gecko Robotics in 2013 with his college roommate, Troy Demmer. He bootstrapped the company by investing his own savings, and by 2015 was, in his words, “completely broke, down to my last hundred dollars, sleeping on the floor of my best friend’s apartment” when an acquisition offer arrived. He turned it down in favor of joining Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch instead, which provided Gecko’s initial investment and let him take his first salary (Forbes). Loosararian has remained CEO as Gecko grew from an industrial inspection startup into an AI-and-robotics platform company serving energy, manufacturing, and defense customers, raising a $125 million Series D at a $1.25 billion valuation in June 2025 (Gecko Robotics: Gecko Reaches Unicorn Status).
Source Notes
This profile draws on Gecko Robotics’ own “About Us” page, a 2022 Forbes profile containing direct quotes from Loosararian, his LinkedIn profile, and a Grove City College alumni announcement. Funding and valuation figures should be re-verified against Gecko’s latest public materials as the company continues to raise capital.