Latest news with #Loosararian
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."
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.
