Gecko Robotics reached Unicorn status after raising $125 million in the Series D round led by Cox Enterprises, bringing its valuation to $1.25 billion. Existing supporters, USIT, XN, Founders Fund, and Y Combinator, also participated in the round. The company currently raises a total of $347 million.
This isn’t Gecko’s first big salary increase. It covered the company in 2019 when it landed $40 million to expand its robotics inspection system. Since then, Gecko has doubled in the infrastructure field. There, over $100 billion is spent on industrial maintenance each year, much of which is still done manually, often with dangerous consequences.
Gecko Robotics raises $125 million to make dangerous testing safer
With this new funding, Gecko will speed up the expansion of defense, energy and overall manufacturing. And if that track record is any indication, those climbing robots don’t slow down anytime soon.
Founded in 2016 by Jake Loosararian and Troy Demmer, Gecko has come a long way from the origins of the university’s dorm room. The Pittsburgh-based startup will build AI-powered climbing robots that inspect industrial infrastructure. This is a historically dangerous and slow task.
Photos of early Gecko founders
The timing makes sense. More than $100 billion is spent on industrial maintenance each year, much of which relies on manual inspections. That usually means sending people to dangerous environments like boilers, refineries and other such as at the time.
Gecko’s robots are built to take over that job. They scale walls, crat across surfaces, collect inspection data that takes much longer for humans to gather. Their AI platform, Cantilever, processes this data and provides clients with actionable insights, whether for Abu Dhabi naval vessels or power plants.
Announcement of the latest round, Loosararian said:
“Gecko is like today from my university dorm room. It’s a company that ensures the safety of public infrastructure, optimisation of energy and manufacturing facilities, and modernisation of the military to stop global conflict.”
The company does not limit itself to one vertical. According to CNBC, the technology is being used by US Navy such as L3Harris and defense contractors such as L3Harris. The energy sector works with NAES and other large-scale operators to monitor power plants. Internationally, Gecko’s robots inspect the tanks and gas infrastructure of the Abu Dhabi National Petroleum Company.
Gecko’s robots don’t just save lives. They collect far more data than traditional methods. According to the company, inspections previously done by hand can be completed 10 times faster, and the robot can collect an additional 1,000 times more information while doing it.
“While much of the tech industry focuses on consumer AI applications, Gecko Robotics uses AI to address key underrated challenges: building and maintaining critical infrastructure.”
Here is a brief overview of how Gecko’s inspection robot works.
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