Gecko Robotics
Pittsburgh unicorn whose wall-climbing robots and Cantilever AI platform map the structural health of Navy warships, ICBM silos, and energy plants.
Background
Jake Loosararian started Gecko in May 2013, straight out of an electrical-engineering senior project at Grove City College that built a wall-climbing robot to inspect a Pennsylvania power plant boiler — work that otherwise put humans on ropes in confined spaces. He ran the company hand-to-mouth for three years, turned down an acquisition offer, and took it through Y Combinator's Winter 2016 batch; co-founder Troy Demmer built out the product side.
The system pairs hardware with software: robots that adhere to steel and climb vertical surfaces, plus drones and fixed sensors, sweep hulls, tanks, boilers, pipelines, and silo liners, taking ultrasonic and visual readings at densities manual spot checks cannot match — the company claims up to 50x faster than manual methods. The readings feed Cantilever, Gecko's AI-powered operating platform, which builds layered digital models of each asset, tracks degradation over time, and recommends repairs before failure. Gecko sells multi-year contracts combining robotic data collection with the software layer.