About Gecko Robotics
Gecko Robotics was founded in 2013 by Jake Loosararian and Troy Demmer, based on Loosararian's personal experience witnessing a fatal industrial accident during a summer job at a coal power plant, which motivated him to develop technology intended to reduce the need for human inspectors to enter certain hazardous or difficult-to-access areas which often require human inspectors to physically access dangerous, hard-to-reach areas of industrial facilities, such as the interior of large storage tanks or elevated boiler surfaces, to manually take spot measurements that may miss corrosion, cracking, or other structural issues located outside the specific areas a human inspector happened to check.
Gecko's core product is a family of robots equipped with an array of sensors, including ultrasonic thickness gauges that can detect wall thinning from corrosion, that can climb vertical and overhead surfaces using magnetic or vacuum-based adhesion, systematically scanning an entire surface, such as the interior wall of a large industrial storage tank or the hull of a ship, to generate comprehensive, data-rich maps of structural condition across the entire inspected surface rather than the limited spot-check coverage typical of manual human inspection, while also keeping human inspectors out of the often confined, hazardous spaces where these inspections traditionally take place. The company's technology has found particular traction in industries with large, safety-critical infrastructure assets requiring regular structural inspection, including power generation, oil and gas, and increasingly naval and maritime applications, including inspection work for the U.S. Navy's ship maintenance programs, where thorough hull and structural inspection is both safety-critical and traditionally very labor-intensive. Gecko has expanded from providing inspection robots and services into a broader software platform that helps infrastructure operators track and analyze structural health data over time across their asset base. The company has raised substantial venture funding from investors including Cox Enterprises, Founders Fund, and Y Combinator, reaching a valuation exceeding $1.7 billion.
