When Roboticists Choose Pittsburgh Over Silicon Valley: The Gecko Robotics Story
By: Carlos J. Queirós
From the Gecko Robotics headquarters on Pittsburgh's North Side, Jake Loosararian tells the story that launched his billion-dollar company. The 34-year-old co-founder and CEO speaks with the earnest intensity of someone driven by mission over profit.
He recalls the fall of 2012 when, as a junior at Grove City College, he visited the Scrubgrass Generating Plant in Kennerdell, Pennsylvania. During the tour, the plant manager revealed that a worker had died the previous year while examining a boiler for defects.
"I was kind of just like, dumbfounded, right?" Loosararian recalls. "In this day and age, people shouldn’t be risking their lives to search for defects that are not visible to the human eye."
More than a decade later, Loosararian’s answer to that plant tragedy is literally scaling the wall behind him. One of Gecko's TOKA 5 wall-climbing robots methodically climbs a test surface, its sensors scanning for the kind of invisible defects that once put human lives at risk. The company's 60,500-square-foot Nova Place headquarters—converted mall space that blends Silicon Valley amenities like an espresso bar, basketball court, and free food with Pittsburgh grit—houses more of these mechanical problem-solvers throughout.
Jake Loosararian, Gecko’s Co-founder and CEO
They aren't showpieces, but working reminders of why Gecko exists: to eliminate the need for humans to risk their lives hunting invisible threats. When Loosararian talks about the "existential problems"—a phrase he returns to repeatedly—technology could help solve, there's an urgency that understands these aren't abstract business challenges, but matters of life and death.
A year after the visit to the Scrubgrass plant, while traveling in Costa Rica, Loosararian watched a green gecko climb the wall of a rainforest bathroom. That moment inspired the name for what would become Gecko Robotics, a company that—as of June 2025—commands a $1.25 billion valuation.
Many see Gecko as an embodiment of Pittsburgh's transformation from the Steel City to an AI and robotics powerhouse. But Gecko's journey to unicorn status isn't a Silicon Valley success story transplanted east, but instead a case study in how place shapes innovation, and how choosing Pittsburgh over the promise of quick venture capital became the company's defining moment—and greatest strategic advantage.
The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
The power plant tragedy that sparked Loosararian’s mission represented far more than an isolated incident—it revealed a widespread challenge across America's aging industrial infrastructure. Traditional inspection methods capture just 500 data points compared to Gecko's robots that collect over 4.2 million data points—delivering 1,000x more data while operating at speeds up to 60 feet per minute.
But the data deficit was just one symptom of a deeper problem. The plant was experiencing regular shutdowns—about 40% of the year lost to forced outages from infrastructure failure.
“Assets at the plant just failed and the plant shut down regularly,” Loosararian says. “That was seen as just the cost of doing business.
Loosararian and Gecko’s co-founder Troy Demmer
This front-row seat to industrial dysfunction gave Loosararian and his Grove City College roommate Troy Demmer, Gecko’s co-founder, crucial insight. The two engineering students had bonded over a shared passion for engineering and a drive to solve real-world problems, which led to a senior project that involved building robots that could climb and scan power plant walls for costly issues like cracks or corrosion. The creation saved their host power plant tens of millions of dollars in labor costs and productivity, revealing what would become Gecko's core mission to inspect critical infrastructure to prevent failures that could kill people or shut down facilities.
What the two students didn't fully grasp then was how their solution addressed an approaching crisis that extends far beyond any single plant. The scale of this challenge has only grown more urgent as America’s industrial workforce ages and takes decades of expertise with them.
“Over the next five years, that knowledge is retiring," Loosararian says. "But we still need more than ever those sectors to be there for us to drive both the existing and the new economy.”
To understand the magnitude of what Gecko is trying to solve, consider this: infrastructure maintenance failures cost the U.S. economy $2.6 trillion annually.
Gecko’s answer to this crisis rests on their Cantilever platform, an operating system built on Loosararian’s belief that in the built world “data is guilty until proven innocent.” To reach a verdict, the platform processes millions of ultrasonic readings from wall-climbing robots equipped with up to 96 ultrasonic transducers to predict critical failures and extend equipment life by 15-20 years. This technology transforms reactive repairs into predictive strategies, turning what was once seen as "the cost of doing business" into preventable problems.
Gecko’s Cantilever platform, an operating system built on the belief that “data is guilty until proven innocent.”
Building in Pittsburgh's Industrial Laboratory
After graduation in 2013, Loosararian officially launched Gecko Robotics, but the early years nearly broke him. He bootstrapped the company by working 100-hour weeks—50-60 hours at a systems automation job and 40-50 hours on Gecko—while sleeping on his best friend's couch for two and a half years. His bank account dwindled to $135 in 2015.
What saved Gecko from becoming another failed startup wasn't venture capital or a viral product launch, it was geography. What kept the company alive during those lean years was Pittsburgh's industrial ecosystem, which provided something crucial: direct access to the customers and problems Gecko was trying to solve. Rather than pitching hypothetical solutions to distant investors, Loosararian could walk into Western Pennsylvania's 2,700+ advanced manufacturing businesses and witness firsthand the infrastructure failures his robots were being designed to prevent. The region became a living laboratory where Gecko could test and refine their robots in real operating conditions.
“Universities should not be thought about as the end...”
"If you don't get access to the problems, it's very hard to build very good solutions," Loosararian says. "Pittsburgh offers a very unique opportunity to get access to the industrial challenges that tech companies elsewhere simply can't reach.”
This customer proximity created a cycle that extended beyond just market access to include the city’s academic infrastructure. Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, the world's first robotics department established in 1979, didn’t just provide the technical foundation and talent pipeline—it offered proven concepts Gecko could build upon. The company leveraged technology originally developed by CMU researchers, including concepts from the Pipeline Explorer, the first untethered robot for inspecting live gas pipelines.
More importantly, Loosararian notes that the company has hired several people from CMU's robotics program, tapping into a talent pool with expertise in both advanced robotics and industrial applications.
And yet, Loosararian believes the region's students and academic institutions must push beyond research for its own sake.
"Universities should not be thought about as the end," Loosararian emphasizes. "The responsibility needs to be taking that incredible unique advantage and then starting a company that can solve an existential problem.”
This philosophy found fertile ground in Pittsburgh's startup infrastructure which provided essential early support. AlphaLab Gear, one of the first three dedicated hardware accelerators globally, offered up to $100,000 investment plus access to specialized equipment and manufacturing networks. Building on this foundation, Innovation Works provided additional funding and mentorship, while the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania chipped in with $10,000 seed funding from Ben Franklin Technology Partners in 2014.
The convergence of multiple funding sources around what started as a college robotics project signaled that Pittsburgh's ecosystem recognized something transformative in Gecko's approach.
But soon, this regional embrace would face its ultimate test.
The Two-Million-Dollar Test
By 2015, Gecko's technology was proving itself in real-world deployments, but success brought an unexpected dilemma for Loosararian. Gecko’s Pittsburgh-centric approach was proving so successful that investors outside the region were starting to notice.
One such investor offered Loosaraian $2 million for a $10 million valuation, but with a non-negotiable condition: Gecko would relocate to San Francisco and build robots in a lab rather than in the field. For someone nearly broke, it was "earth-shattering money." The financial pressure was immense. Looking back, rejecting this offer meant walking away from what would have been roughly $200 million today.
Yet the offer revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Gecko successful in the first place. Loosararian's rejection of the offer revealed something deeper about Pittsburgh's strategic value.
"Forward deployed robotics need to be built with and close to the customer,” Loosararian says. “Robotics needs to be built in the field where you can test and iterate in real-world conditions, not a lab in Silicon Valley. "
For Loosararian, this wasn’t just a business decision, it was a moral one rooted in the tragedy that started it all.
"Someone had died trying to stop those boilers from failing and breaking at that power plant," he recalls. "To give up and sell the company, to not continue to pursue the vision and mission of creating technology for these sectors… it just seemed like something I just couldn't do. It might have made me rich, but we wouldn't be able to succeed in providing technology for these really important sectors that have been forgotten about."
The decision to reject the San Francisco offer and stay in Pittsburgh would prove to be Gecko's defining strategic choice.
The Pittsburgh Advantage Compounds
The vindication of Loosararian's geographic bet came sooner than expected.
In the fall 2016 Y Combinator's Kevin Hale visited Pittsburgh specifically to recruit local startups. Troy Demmer facilitated the meeting between Loosararian and Hale, leading to immediate application and acceptance into the prestigious accelerator program.
The timing reflected Pittsburgh's growing reputation as a robotics hub. The region's ecosystem of 125+ robotics companies clustered along “Robotics Row” and supporting over 7,300 high-impact jobs was producing unique innovations that Silicon Valley's consumer-focused environment couldn't replicate.
Despite throwing up from nerves before his Demo Day presentation, Loosararian successfully pitched investors and landed seed funding that valued Gecko at nearly $14 million. Crucially, the Y Combinator experience provided mentorship from Sam Altman and Kevin Hale, validating the decision to scale independently rather than relocating to the Valley.
The regional partnerships that followed proved the tangible value of Pittsburgh’s industrial and defense connections. The U.S. Navy partnership, which saw 400% usage increase in 2024, leveraged Pittsburgh's defense industry connections—with Gecko's robots reducing ship rudder inspection times from 11 days to just 1 day. The $100 million partnership with NAES Energy, America's largest independent power operator, showed how local relationships translated into major contracts.
These early wins created a flywheel effect that has only accelerated. Recent announcements include Gecko's Extended Reality product development with L3Harris and expanding international presence through partnerships with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. What started as a choice to stay close to Pittsburgh's industrial base has become a global competitive advantage, demonstrating how local roots can enable worldwide scale.
The Model That Silicon Valley Missed
Gecko's success reveals a fundamental insight about innovation geography: not all technology problems require Silicon Valley solutions. While coastal venture capital flows toward consumer applications, critical infrastructure represents a massive market opportunity that requires different capabilities: manufacturing knowledge, industrial partnerships, and patience for long development cycles.
The gap between what Silicon Valley optimizes for and what industrial problems demand helps explain why Pittsburgh has become increasingly attractive to both startups and investors. The city’s ecosystem provides these capabilities in ways that traditional tech hubs struggle to replicate. The concentration of robotics companies, CMU's research pipeline, and industrial customer base creates unique advantages for companies solving physical-world problems in critical industries. This has drawn $63 million in Build Back Better Regional Challenge grants specifically for robotics cluster development, while NVIDIA established its inaugural AI Tech Community in Pittsburgh in 2024.
Gecko's defense contracts illustrate how these advantages translate into major opportunities. The Air Force contracted Gecko to inspect 400+ Sentinel ICBM silos and companies demonstrating how Pittsburgh-based firms can capture significant portions of the $150 billion in DOD technology allocations.
“I don’t think that Gecko and Abridge are the end of the cycle. They are the beginning.”
Governor Josh Shapiro's recent tour of Gecko's headquarters underscored this momentum: "Gecko Robotics builds robots that can climb the walls of oil service tanks and inspect the beams holding up our bridges, and their success shows us what's possible here in Pennsylvania."
Gecko's billion-dollar valuation isn't an isolated success story. The city now boasts seven unicorn companies valued at more than $1 billion, with four achieving that status within the last 12 months alone. The roster includes language-learning app Duolingo and autonomous vehicle company Aurora—the region's first unicorns in 2019—alongside health care scribe Abridge AI, robotic AI company Skild AI, medical device manufacturer Krystal Biotech, and autonomous truck builder Stack AV.
"We have 20-30 companies at $100 million valuations or higher. I don't think that Gecko and Abridge are the end of the cycle. They are the beginning," says Sean Luther, president and CEO of InnovatePGH.
This unicorn momentum has positioned Pittsburgh to compete with Miami in terms of billion-dollar startups while overtaking Detroit, demonstrating how the region's focus on commercializing deep tech innovations in robotics and AI is creating sustainable competitive advantages.
Gecko's journey from near-bankruptcy to unicorn status validates not just one company's strategy, but an entire ecosystem's approach to building technology that matters.
When Place Becomes Strategy
The culmination of this Pittsburgh-first strategy came recently when Gecko raised a $125 million Series D round led by Cox Enterprises, achieving unicorn status. The company was named to Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies 2024, positioning it alongside global technology leaders and proving that critical infrastructure innovation could compete with any Silicon Valley darling.
But the real validation goes deeper than valuations or accolades.
The gecko that climbed a Costa Rica bathroom wall became the symbol of a company that chose Pittsburgh over Silicon Valley, industrial applications over consumer apps, and mission over quick exits. In doing so, Gecko Robotics didn't just build a billion-dollar company—it proved that America's most critical technology challenges might be best solved in the industrial heartland where infrastructure problems are lived experiences rather than abstract opportunities.
Today, as Gecko's wall-climbing robots inspect critical infrastructure worldwide, they represent more than technological capability—they embody the promise of American industrial renewal.
"We can get 10 more gigawatts of power in the US grid without building a single new power plant," Loosararian explains. "That's the kind of efficiency we need to meet the moment that AI is presenting to us."
Looking back, the choice between $2 million in Silicon Valley and sleeping on a couch in Pittsburgh wasn't really a choice at all for Loosararian—it was the difference between building yet another startup or solving problems that really matter, that could actually save lives.
In choosing Pittsburgh over easy capital, Gecko didn't just create a unicorn company—it helped establish this city as the place where robots meet reality, where invisible infrastructure threats become visible data, and where a safer future is built one wall-climbing inspection at a time.
