Jake Loosararian is the co-founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics, the company combining advanced robotics and AI-powered software to help ensure the availability, reliability and sustainability of the critical infrastructure that powers our world - today and tomorrow.
Jake built the first version of Gecko’s wall-climbing robots as a college engineering student after learning how frequently assets failed at a local power plant. He discovered how little data we have about the important assets that power our daily lives. As an engineer, he saw this as a solvable problem, and his initial robot helped that power plant drastically reduce its downtime, saving the plant money and preventing power outages for thousands of families.
At 22 years old, after graduating from Grove City College near Pittsburgh, Jake bootstrapped and launched Gecko Robotics in 2013. In 2016, Jake, down to his last few dollars, turned down an acquisition offer to join up with YCombinator, the world’s most prestigious startup incubator. While many of his peers built apps or solutions to day-to-day business challenges, Jake had a different path in mind. He chose to look at how advanced robotics and digitalization could help tackle an industry in critical need of modernization: our global infrastructure.
Today, Gecko’s business model of creating data with robots, and building enterprise software with it, is pioneering an emerging business model for the real world. The business model focuses on data that has never been accessible before: from pipelines, boilers, tanks, ship hulls, missile silos and other critical asset types. Gecko’s AI-driven software platform enables human experts to improve sustainability metrics of those assets, determine optimal performance and ensure predictive maintenance by creating digital twins. Beyond Gecko’s work with energy, oil and gas, and manufacturing companies around the world, Gecko also works with the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy to protect and optimize maintenance plans for critical infrastructure.
Jake currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife, and four kids. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.