Gecko Robotics, co-founded and led by Armenian-American entrepreneur Jake Loosararian, has officially reached unicorn status. The Pittsburgh-based company just raised $125 million in a Series D funding round, more than doubling its previous valuation to $1.25 billion, reports Zartonk Media citing CNBC. Gecko Robotics announced the round on Thursday, June 12, 2025.
The company’s technology has been increasingly utilized in the defense, energy, and manufacturing sectors—industries where insights on the health of costly aircraft, ships, pipelines, and plants are invaluable.
The new funding means the company, founded in 2013 by Loosararian and co-founder Troy Demmer out of their college dorm room, continues its upward trajectory. Demmer serves as the company’s Chief Operating Officer and has helped scale Gecko’s operations as it continues to expand across industries and geographies. The company’s previous round, a $173 million Series C in December 2023, valued it at $633 million.
The round was led by Cox Enterprises, with continued backing from existing investors including USIT, XN, Founders Fund, and Y Combinator. To date, the company has now raised $347 million.
Gecko Robotics builds AI-powered robots that help organizations—including the U.S. military—inspect and monitor critical infrastructure. Its robots inspect and monitor critical infrastructure—ranging from military aircraft and ships to power plants and gas facilities. The company’s robots are capable of climbing, crawling, flying, and swimming to assess the health of high-value assets and access difficult locations. The data they collect is analyzed through Gecko’s proprietary operating platform, Cantilever, which delivers insights to optimize performance, extend lifespan, and improve safety.
A two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, Gecko ranked No. 30 on the 2025 list. Its customers span defense, energy, and manufacturing sectors. The company works across a variety of physical assets and industries, including:
- L3Harris Technologies and the U.S. Navy, to inspect and maintain critical military aircraft and ships
- NAES, the largest independent power operator in the U.S., to modernize and optimize energy plant efficiency
- Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), to inspect gas infrastructure, tanks, and facilities
“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.
Gecko’s AI-driven Cantilever platform has reportedly enabled power plants to operate up to 5% more efficiently and has been used to modernize C-130 military aircraft. The company stated that it will use the additional capital to accelerate growth and deepen its presence in defense, energy, and manufacturing.
Trae Stephens, partner at Founders Fund and co-founder and executive chairman of defense tech company Anduril, CNBC’s 2025 No. 1 Disruptor, praised Gecko: “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. 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.”
Gecko was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch, which helped the company scale its platform while still early and bootstrapped.
Gecko’s mission is bold: to make the world safer with robots.
With Armenian roots and global ambition, this is a win for innovation and representation.
