Gecko Robotics joins unicorn club with $125M raise to make infrastructure safer with AI-powered wall-climbing robots

Gecko Robotics just hit unicorn status after raising $125 million in a Series D round led by Cox Enterprises, bringing its valuation to $1.25 billion. Existing backers, USIT, XN, Founders Fund, and Y Combinator, also joined the round. The company has now raised a total of $347 million.

This isn’t Gecko’s first big raise. Back in 2019, we covered the company when it landed $40 million to scale its robotic inspection systems. Since then, Gecko has doubled down on the infrastructure space, where over $100 billion is spent each year on industrial maintenance, much of it still done manually, often with dangerous consequences.

Gecko Robotics Raises $125M to Make Dangerous Inspections Safer

With this new funding, Gecko plans to speed up its expansion across defense, energy, and manufacturing. And if its track record is any indication, those climbing robots aren’t slowing down anytime soon.

Founded in 2016 by Jake Loosararian and Troy Demmer, Gecko has come a long way from its college dorm room origins. The Pittsburgh-based startup builds AI-powered climbing robots that inspect industrial infrastructure, a task that’s historically been dangerous and slow.

Photos of Gecko founders in their early days

The timing makes sense. Every year, over $100 billion is spent on industrial maintenance, much of it relying on manual inspections. That usually means sending people into risky environments—tanks, boilers, refineries—where accidents and fatalities are still all too common.

Gecko’s robots are built to take over that work. They scale walls, crawl across surfaces, and collect inspection data that would take a human much longer to gather. Their AI platform, Cantilever, processes this data and gives clients actionable insights—whether it’s for a Navy ship or a power plant in Abu Dhabi.

Announcing the latest round, Loosararian said:

“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.” 

The company isn’t limiting itself to just one vertical. Its tech is used by the U.S. Navy and defense contractors like L3Harris to inspect military aircraft and ships, CNBC reported. In the energy sector, it works with NAES and other large operators to monitor power plants. Internationally, Gecko’s robots are inspecting tanks and gas infrastructure for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Gecko’s robots don’t just save lives—they collect far more data than traditional methods. According to the company, inspections that used to be done by hand can now be completed 10 times faster, and the robots gather 1,000 times more information while doing it.

“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,” said Trae Stephens, partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of defense tech company Anduril.

Here’s a quick video overview of how Gecko’s inspection robots work.