- Gecko Robotics announced it has raised $40 million in Series B funding to develop wall-climbing robots for automated infrastructure inspection
Gecko Robotics has announced that it raised $40 million in Series B funding. And the company has been developing wall-climbing robots for automated infrastructure inspection. This round of funding was led by Drive Capital with participation from previous investors including Founders Fund, Next47, and Y-Combinator.
Some of the angel investors who participated in Gecko’s latest round of funding include billionaire “Shark Tank” investor Mark Cuban, SoftBank senior managing partner Deep Nishar, Gusto CEO Josh Reeves, and Stone Bridge Ventures managing director Jake Seid. And the company’s previous investors also include Justin Kan, Gokul Rajaram, and Paul Buchheit.
Every year, businesses spend over $500 billion on industrial maintenance and replacement. And these inspections are typically conducted by humans — which may result in injury and death, according to The Robot Report.
The robots built by Gecko Robotics can crawl up tanks, boilers, scrubbers, and piping in the power, oil and gas, and pulp and paper industries:
“We are growing fast, solving a critical infrastructure problems that affect our lives, and can even save lives,” stated Gecko Robotics co-founder and CEO Jake Loosararian. “At our core, we are a robot-enabled software company that helps stop life-threatening catastrophes. We’ve developed a revolutionary way to use robots as an enabler to capture data for predictability of infrastructure — reducing failure, explosions, emissions, and billions of dollars of loss each year.”
Gecko plans to use its robots for acoustic, laser, electromagnetic, and other non-destructive testing modules. And Gecko Robotics also added that its software takes large amounts of data gathered by the sensors to help predict when and where infrastructure failures will occur.
Gecko Robotics started testing its technology a few years ago. And now the company has offices in Houston and Austin, Texas, and in Europe.
With this round of funding, Gecko is planning to scale up its business operations. And the company went from 45 employees to 115 employees over the past year.
