Latest news with #GeckoRobotics
CBS News
3 days ago
- Business
- CBS News
A look at some of the major investments unveiled during AI and energy summit in Pittsburgh
With pomp and fanfare, the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on Tuesday in Pittsburgh showcased the technological know-how of the region's universities and vast energy resources. While several investments were unveiled, the region's aspirations are much bigger. "The question we have to ask is what happens when that circus leaves? We have to make sure that this translates into investment into the city," Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian said. A lot of the investments announced on Tuesday are in the discussion phase, and most of the big-ticket projects are in the eastern part of the state. But in southwestern Pennsylvania, the focus is on generating the massive amounts of energy artificial intelligence requires. A $15 billion retrofit of the Homer City power plant to natural gas is expected to power a massive data center providing AI companies the computing capacity needed, and FirstEnergy says it's investing $15 billion in upgrades to Pennsylvania's power grid to provide the reliable transmission of electricity. "To enable things like artificial intelligence development, shale development and any other form of economic and technological development that there is," FirstEnergy CEO Brian Tierney said. But the biggest news involves Cranberry-based Westinghouse, which announced it will be building 10 large nuclear reactors across the country beginning in 2030, creating $75 billion of economic value nationally and $6 billion in Pennsylvania. Emerging from bankruptcy in 2018, the resurgent company says it needs to hire 15,000 new employees in the state. "These are great jobs across manufacturing, engineering and construction," interim Westinghouse CEO Dan Sumner said. Ramped-up energy production will enable the construction of more data centers like the one now proposed at the old Jones and Laughlin Steel site in Aliquippa, and centers like it are needed to spawn new AI and robotic companies like Pittsburgh's Gecko, which just recently attained unicorn status, meaning it's worth more than $1 billion. "We need to see investment from those companies into this region and continue to do so," Loosararian said. "You'll start to see an ecosystem of companies like Gecko beginning to emerge." And the summit is already spawning deals to employ AI technology, a partnership between Gecko and U.S. Steel, and another partnership between Google and Westinghouse. All of this is contributing to a new AI economy here in the region.
CNBC
10-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
34-year-old built a $1.3 billion business after working 100-hour weeks to keep it alive: I got there by 'going through hell'
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. "Everyone said, 'Don't f---ing do it,'" said Loosararian, whose company ranks No. 30 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 spent nearly three years struggling to bootstrap Gecko, sleeping on friends' couches and facing bankruptcy while working 100-hour weeks, he said. Sometimes, his workplace was the "dirty and horrible" insides of power plant boilers, fixing early robot prototypes when they malfunctioned, he added. Loosararian considered giving up and walking away multiple times during that stretch, he said. But he still figured that running his own company was better than working for someone else, and the more time he spent with Gecko's customers, the more he convinced himself that his business was viable, he said. "What helped me get through it was spending time with customers and hearing how important the problem was to solve ... That gave me the encouragement I needed to feel I wasn't just fooling myself," said Loosararian. In 2016, Loosararian's resilience finally paid dividends when Gecko got accepted to Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, paving the way for the business to land seed funding from the accelerator and its network of investors. Today, Gecko makes robots armed with AI technology that can climb walls, fly and even swim underwater to inspect and collect data on critical infrastructure like power plants, bridges, dams and military equipment. Its clients include the U.S. Navy, power plant operator NAES and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, according to the company. Loosararian's early struggles only solidified his resolve to stick it out as a bootstrapping founder, he said: "Those scars allow you to act with confidence, courage and a will to make [your goals] become reality. That's a very helpful thing. It was only possible through that refinement of going through hell."
Bloomberg
10-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Gecko Robotics CEO on AI, Energy, Scaling Up
Gecko Robotics CEO and co-founder Jake Loosararian talks about the business of robots and artificial intelligence. He speaks to Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Tech" from Sun Valley, Idaho. (Source: Bloomberg)
CNBC
12-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
CNBC Disruptor 50: Gecko Robotics CEO on using AI-powered robots to test critical infrastructure
CNBC's Julia Boorstin and Gecko Robotics co-founder and CEO Jake Loosararian join 'Squawk Box' as the company comes in at #30 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list.
CNBC
12-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Gecko Robotics raises $125 million in deal valuing critical infrastructure startup over $1 billion
Gecko Robotics announced on Thursday that it raised $125 million in a Series D funding round, raising the AI and robotics company's valuation to $1.25 billion. The new round of funding means the Pittsburgh-based company has reached unicorn status, roughly twelve years after it was founded by Jake Loosararian. The company's previous round of funding, a $173 million Series C in December 2023, valued it at $633 million. To date, the company has raised $347 million from investors including USIT, XN, Founders Fund and Y Combinator. Its latest round was led by new investor Cox Enterprises. Gecko Robotics, the two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, ranked No. 30 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. It uses a variety of robots that can climb, fly and swim around critical infrastructure, gaining valuable insights and data on the structures that is then parsed via Gecko's AI-powered operating platform, Cantilever. That information is then used by organizations to optimize, maintain and monitor the infrastructure. The company works across a variety of physical assets and industries, ranging from L3Harris Technologies and the U.S. Navy for critical military aircraft and ships; energy companies like NAES, the U.S.'s largest independent power operator, to modernize and optimize power plants, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, where Gecko's robots inspect gas facilities, tanks and other infrastructure. "Gecko was built out of my college dorm room, to what it is today — the company ensuring the safety of public infrastructure, the optimization of energy and manufacturing facilities, and the modernization of militaries to deter global conflict," Loosararian said in a statement announcing the latest round. The company said it will use the additional funding to accelerate its growth, and its continued push into sectors like defense, energy and manufacturing. Gecko said that its Cantilever operating platform provides insights that can do everything from modernizing C-130 aircraft to recommending how a power plant can operate at up to 5% greater efficiency. "While much of the tech industry is focused on consumer AI applications, Gecko Robotics is using AI to address an important, underappreciated challenge – the building and maintenance of critical infrastructure," stated Trae Stephens, partner at Founders Fund, and also co-founder and executive chairman of defense tech company Anduril, the 2025 No. 1 Disruptor, in the deal statement. "Gecko's business continues to grow as organizations across a wide variety of sectors realize this work is more safely and thoroughly performed by sensors and robots than humans," he added.
