Jake Loosararian, Gecko Robotics | All-In Summit 2024

Gecko began because a power-plant manager told Jake his best friend had died doing a rope inspection in the exact spot where Jake stood. The same boiler reportedly lost 40% uptime to tube explosions at $2 million per day, and Jake says his first wall-climbing ultrasonic robot saved the plant $30 million that year.

Gecko turned inspection from a shutdown expense into an operating tool. At one Georgia facility, robots gathered terabytes of tank data in 12 hours instead of about a month offline; across 50 assets, Gecko says it extended useful life by ten years on average, created $15 million in value, and lifted margin about 4%.

The commercial upside is now large enough to support enterprise-scale contracts. Jake said the world’s 12th-largest oil-and-gas company identified 100,000 tanks and about $122,000 of ROI per tank, leading to an initial $30 million contract that he expects to grow to $100 million.

Gecko’s defense work has moved from pilots into meaningful programs. Jake said its Navy work is now worth tens of millions after cutting flight-deck inspection labor 85% and turnaround by about a month; Gecko is also helping scope Air Force missile-silo modernization and the Columbia-class submarine program.

The company deliberately sells software, not robots, even though robots collect the data. Customers buy a software implementation and recurring license, with robots treated as the data-gathering layer; the sales conversation has moved from plant managers toward CTOs and CFOs because the product affects depreciation, throughput, and capital allocation.

Jake rejected advice to build the robots in a lab and instead developed them inside customer facilities, sometimes soldering on site. That forward-deployed approach let Gecko sell directly to plant managers, fail and repair in real conditions, and become profitable in 2017, one year after its 2016 YC launch.

Gecko’s strategic moat is the first-party industrial data, not ownership of every robot. Jake said third-party machines such as ANYbotics can plug into Gecko’s API, and he would happily buy Optimus robots; the company wants whatever machines can collect useful data for its operating platform.

Jake’s broader bet is that first-party data companies will beat standalone SaaS as software becomes commoditized. Gecko’s robots, sensors, and fixed monitors create proprietary datasets from infrastructure that often still relies on paper records or missing asset lists, giving its software information competitors cannot simply license.