Jake Loosararian

Jake Loosararian is the co‑founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gecko Robotics, a pioneering robotics and AI company dedicated to protecting and modernizing the world’s critical infrastructure. As an engineer‑turned‑entrepreneur, Loosararian has transformed a college‑aged curiosity about industrial asset failure into a rapidly scaling technology business that deploys advanced robotics and data analytics to safeguard power plants, pipelines, bridges, military facilities, and other essential physical systems.

Loosararian’s journey began in 2012 while he was an electrical engineering student at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College. During a senior project, he built a wall‑climbing robot equipped with ultrasonic sensors to inspect the interior of a nearby power plant’s boiler — a challenging environment where traditional inspections were dangerous, time‑consuming, and expensive. That early prototype not only helped the facility prevent costly outages but also revealed a broader problem: the lack of reliable data about the health of critical assets. Motivated by the opportunity to make infrastructure safer and more efficient, Loosararian cofounded Gecko Robotics upon graduating in 2013, bootstrapping the company through its earliest, most uncertain years.

The road to success was far from smooth. For nearly three years, Loosararian worked tirelessly with limited funding, often sleeping on friends’ couches and working in harsh industrial environments while refining his robots. At times he faced financial hardship and even considered abandoning the venture, but his conviction in the underlying mission and close collaboration with early customers kept him committed. In 2016, Gecko Robotics was accepted into the Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator — a pivotal moment that helped the company secure seed funding and scale its operations without sacrificing its vision.

Under Loosararian’s leadership, Gecko’s climbing, crawling, flying, and submersible robots capture previously inaccessible data about structural health. Combined with AI‑driven software, this data enables predictive maintenance, enhances operational performance, and helps clients make informed decisions that reduce downtime, extend asset lifespans, and improve safety across industries. Today, the company partners with major energy providers and government agencies, including the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy, and has achieved a multibillion‑dollar valuation, reflecting both its technological impact and market potential.

Loosararian’s story is one of resilience, technical ingenuity, and mission‑driven leadership. By turning a classroom engineering challenge into a globally relevant enterprise, he continues to push the boundaries of how robotics and artificial intelligence can be harnessed to address some of the most pressing infrastructure challenges of the modern world.