Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company using AI and robotics to modernise maintenance techniques in defence, has doubled its valuation since its last funding round in December 2023, reaching more than a billion dollars in its Series D valuation, according to a company statement on 12 June 2025.
The round was led by new investors Cox Enterprises, and continuing investors USIT, XN, Founders Fund, and YCombinator.
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“Gecko was built out of my college dorm room to what it is today – the company ensuring… the modernisation of allied militaries to deter global conflict,” besides innovating the energy and manufacturing sectors, said Jake Loosararian, co-founder and chief executive.
The additional funding will accelerate Gecko’s growth and its focus on modernising critical sectors including defense, energy, and manufacturing, which are becoming investment priorities for governments and companies around the world.
Sustainment
In defence, Gecko have helped the US Navy to overcome enduring inefficiencies in the conventional maintenance of its surface fleet. The company use robots carrying advanced sensors to scour hull structures, gathering and processing the data with AI to provide a high-fidelity digital twin representation known as a ‘rich asset model’.
This method has cut labour by 85% in mapping hulls, and saved the US Navy more than four months of maintenance time, according to Loosararian, who spoke to Naval Technology in December 2024 to discuss what seemed to have been the needless depletion of the UK Royal Navy surface fleet at that time.
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By GlobalDataThe predictive maintenance analytics that Gecko’s solution provides will help extend the life of ships at a time of global animosity.
Furthermore, the emerging unicorn has also assisted major aerospace primes in the United States, such as L3Harris, to help the US Air Force sustain military aircraft.
With more than 430,000 square feet of hangar space, L3Harris conduct aircraft modernisation, maintenance, repair and overhaul for various fixed-wing platforms from the F-35 Lightning multirole fighter to the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft and the C-130 Hercules tactical transporter.
Gecko is developing an extended reality capability that enhances detection of physical defects, allowing for improved efficiency in the aircraft maintenance and sustainment process.
Operators will uses drones to fly around an asset (in this case an aircraft) and collect high quality images; as many as 10,000 during each process.
