Gecko Robotics lands $71M Navy contract, says wall-climbing robots could add 15-20 GW to US power grid

Summary

Gecko Robotics has landed a $71 million Navy contract to deploy wall-climbing inspection robots on ships. The company is also launching power plant efficiency technology on July 4th that could add 15-20 GW to the US thermal fleet without new construction.

Jake Loosararian founded Gecko in 2013 after visiting a power plant in Franklin, Pennsylvania where a boiler was shut down 30% of the year due to catastrophic pressure vessel failures. Workers scaled 100 feet in the air on ropes to diagnose problems. One worker died doing the job the year before Loosararian arrived. That experience convinced him that Silicon Valley had largely abandoned critical infrastructure workers.

Loosararian bootstrapped for three years, living homeless and sleeping on a friend's floor in Pittsburgh, before Y Combinator recruited him in 2016. He rejected advice from prominent Silicon Valley investors to build the product in a lab and launch autonomously. Instead, he moved back to Pittsburgh to stay close to customers—independent power producers who lack the cost-pass-through mechanisms of utilities and face real financial pain when assets fail. For three years, he was at power plants daily, building technology in the actual environment.

The core product is a wall-climbing robot equipped with advanced sensors. Neodymium magnets in a Halbach array grip steel surfaces, while vacuum suction handles non-ferrous materials like stainless steel and concrete. The robot gathers ultrasonic and electromagnetic data about structural health, similar to ultrasound on human bodies. That data feeds into Cantilever, Gecko's software platform, which tracks asset health year-over-year and predicts failures before they occur.

The business spans dual-use markets. Energy is the foundation. Oil and gas, power plants, and refineries face downtime costs of $30 million per day. Defense is the growth vector. The Navy contract focuses on ship readiness. Currently, two of every five Navy ships sit in dry dock. Gecko's inspection and diagnostics can cut that process from 3-4 months to near-instant, freeing vessels for patrol. The company also works on manufacturing and shipbuilding, applying the same sensor and data expertise to welding and structural integrity.

Loosararian frames the value proposition beyond repair. If operators understand asset health in real time, they can push production without risking catastrophic failure. A refinery manager facing $100-per-barrel oil prices needs to know whether increasing throughput will cause the asset to break. Existing operational models built on consultant advice and generic software cannot answer that question. Gecko's 13 years of data on half a million assets inside Cantilever creates an unfair advantage. The company now runs finite element analysis models powered by that historical dataset, allowing operators to optimize production safely.

The power plant efficiency opportunity is the near-term headline. Six trials have shown that applying Gecko's inspection and optimization logic across the US thermal fleet could unlock 15-20 GW of additional capacity through better utilization of existing infrastructure. That avoids the need for new power plants entirely.

On repair, Loosararian positions it as act two. The first priority is owning the health data of the world's most critical infrastructure. Once that dataset exists and feeds AI models, repair automation follows—but only after understanding which repair techniques matter most and deliver the highest value to customers.