Jake Loosararian struggled for three years to get his artificial intelligence startup Gecko Robotics off the ground. He considered walking away, when a customer offered him $500,000 to buy the business in 2015.
Now, a decade later, the business is worth $1.25 billion — following a $125 million fundraising round led by Cox Enterprises, the company announced on June 12. The new funding round means Gecko’s valuation has nearly doubled since December 2023, when it was valued at $633 million in a different fundraising round.
Gecko began in 2012, when Loosararian and some of his electrical engineering classmates at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College built a 40-pound robot with an ultrasonic scanner to climb and scan a local power plant’s walls, hoping to identify costly issues in need of repair, like cracks or corrosion. The robot ended up saving the power plant millions of dollars in productivity and labor costs, Loosararian told CNBC Make It on November 23.
Loosararian, Gecko’s co-founder and CEO, decided to turn the school project into a full-time business after graduating in 2013 — hoping to build robots that could help inspect critical infrastructure of all kinds. He did it against the advice of his family and professors, he said.
