What Is Gecko Robotics?
Gecko Robotics is a US infrastructure-inspection company that builds robots capable of climbing the vertical steel walls of tanks, boilers, hulls, and pressure vessels while collecting ultrasonic thickness and corrosion data. Instead of scaffolding crews manually tapping and measuring a surface for weeks, a Gecko robot drives the same surface in a fraction of the time and logs dense, repeatable data as it goes.
The company pairs its hardware with Cantilever, a software platform that turns the raw sensor readings into a structured asset-health record engineers and plant operators can track over time. That combination — robot plus software record — is the core of Gecko's pitch: inspection is not just a one-time robot demo, it is recurring data on the condition of expensive, safety-critical infrastructure.
Gecko's customers sit in two heavy-industry categories: energy (power plants, refineries, pipelines) and defense (US Navy ships and shore facilities), both of which have large fleets of aging steel assets that require regular, costly inspection.
Toka And The Wall-Climbing Robot Fleet
Toka is the name most associated with Gecko's magnetic wall-climbing crawler, the robot line built to adhere to vertical and overhead steel surfaces using magnetic wheels or tracks while carrying ultrasonic testing (UT) sensors. It moves across a boiler wall, storage tank, or ship hull the way an inspector would move a probe by hand, except it can cover far more surface area and log every reading with a location tag.
The core technical problem Gecko is solving is coverage versus cost. Manual ultrasonic inspection typically samples a small percentage of a structure's surface because scaffolding and inspector time are expensive, which means corrosion between sample points can go undetected. A wall-climbing robot that can safely traverse the whole surface changes the math: more data points, collected faster, without the safety exposure of hanging a person on scaffolding inside a boiler or fuel tank.
Gecko has expanded its platform beyond a single crawler design into a family of robots suited to different geometries — flat tank walls, curved hulls, and tight boiler tube sections — all feeding data back into Cantilever. For more on how these systems fit into industrial automation broadly, see our autonomous mobile robots overview.
Cantilever: The Software Layer
Cantilever is Gecko's software platform for asset integrity management. It ingests inspection data — from Gecko's own robots as well as other sources — and builds a persistent digital record of a structure's condition, including thickness trends, corrosion maps, and inspection history that plant engineers can query instead of digging through paper reports.
This is the part of Gecko's business model that looks more like enterprise software than robotics: the company sells recurring access to Cantilever alongside inspection services, aiming to make itself the system of record for an asset's structural health over its operating life, not just a one-time inspection vendor.
That software-plus-hardware bundle is also why Gecko is frequently discussed alongside industrial robot companies broadly. See our industrial robot companies roundup for how Gecko's model compares to other automation vendors.
Defense And Energy Deployments
On the defense side, Gecko has worked with the US Navy to inspect ship hulls and tanks, aiming to cut the time and labor cost of the dry-dock and maintenance inspections the Navy relies on to keep its fleet seaworthy. Faster, more thorough hull and tank inspections matter directly to ship readiness and maintenance scheduling.
On the energy side, Gecko's robots inspect boilers, storage tanks, and other steel infrastructure at power plants and industrial sites, where unplanned outages for manual inspection are costly and corrosion failures carry real safety risk. This puts Gecko's use case closer to critical-infrastructure maintenance than to the consumer or warehouse robotics most people picture. For background on how defense-linked robotics platforms are typically structured and regulated, see our military robots overview.
Because both customer bases are safety- and readiness-critical, Gecko's growth has leaned heavily on long-cycle, high-trust contracts rather than a mass-market product launch — a pattern common to serious industrial robot safety and inspection ventures. See our industrial robot safety page for the broader context on why inspection rigor matters in these environments.
Founder, Funding, And Valuation
Gecko Robotics was founded by Jake Loosararian, who has said the idea traces back to seeing the risks and gaps of manual inspection work in a power plant setting and building a robot to do it more safely and thoroughly. The company is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city with a long industrial and steel heritage that Gecko has leaned into as part of its identity.
Gecko has raised substantial venture funding across multiple rounds from investors backing industrial and defense-tech companies, and reporting has placed the company's valuation at roughly $1.25 billion, a level reached as its defense and energy contract base grew. As with any private company, exact funding totals and valuation marks are reported by outlets covering individual raises rather than published directly by Gecko on an ongoing basis, so treat specific dollar figures as time-stamped to their source.
That growth has also made Gecko Robotics a recognizable name in searches for infrastructure-robotics investing and careers, alongside its core inspection business.
Bottom Line
Gecko Robotics pairs magnetic, wall-climbing inspection robots like its Toka-line crawlers with the Cantilever software platform to give power plants, industrial sites, and the US Navy a faster, more complete picture of corrosion and structural health than manual inspection alone. Founded by Jake Loosararian and headquartered in Pittsburgh, the company has grown into a roughly $1.25 billion venture on the back of defense and energy contracts, positioning itself as a data platform for critical infrastructure as much as a robotics vendor.
See how Gecko's inspection robots fit the wider industrial-robotics landscape in our autonomous mobile robots overview and industrial robot companies roundup, and check our military robots page for how defense-linked robotics platforms typically operate.
FAQs
What does Gecko Robotics do?
Gecko Robotics builds wall-climbing robots that inspect power plants, industrial tanks, and Navy ships using ultrasonic sensors, paired with its Cantilever software platform that turns the readings into a tracked asset-health record.
What is Toka by Gecko Robotics?
Toka is the name associated with Gecko's magnetic wall-climbing crawler robot, built to adhere to vertical steel surfaces like boiler walls, tanks, and ship hulls and collect dense ultrasonic thickness data as it moves.
Who founded Gecko Robotics?
Gecko Robotics was founded by Jake Loosararian, who built the company around automating manual, safety-risky inspection work at power plants. The company is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
What is Gecko Robotics' valuation?
Reporting has placed Gecko Robotics' valuation at roughly $1.25 billion following its venture funding rounds, driven by growth in its defense and energy inspection contracts. Exact figures are time-stamped to the reporting source, not an ongoing public disclosure.
Does Gecko Robotics work with the US Navy?
Yes. Gecko Robotics has worked with the US Navy on hull and tank inspections aimed at speeding up dry-dock and maintenance checks that keep ships in service, using the same wall-climbing robot and Cantilever software approach it applies in energy plants.