Jake Loosararian is the co-founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics, the company combining advanced robotics and AI-powered software to build, operate and modernize the world’s most critical infrastructure. As a student at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College in 2012, Jake visited a local power plant which was suffering from persistent downtime at the facility, costing millions of dollars per month. He saw this as a solvable problem and built a robot out of his college dorm room to help that power plant drastically reduce its downtime, saving the plant money and preventing power outages for thousands of families. Jake made it his mission to assess the health of the built world and launched Gecko Robotics in 2013. For years, he was bootstrapping, sleeping on a friend's floor, and living on the edge to get the company off the ground. He was down to his last $100 before being persuaded to talk to a venture partner from startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2016. Gecko Robotics graduated from Y Combinator with a lot of momentum and even an acquisition offer. But, Jake and his co-founder Troy Demmer turned down that offer in favor of building the company their way - close to the customer in the field, rather than out of a lab in Silicon Valley. Today, Gecko uses a variety of robots that can climb, fly, walk and swim to collect an unprecedented amount of data on built structures, and its own AI-powered software, Cantilever, provides a decision making structure that can assess and predict its health. Partners include Fortune 100 companies in energy, oil and gas, and manufacturing sectors around the world, as well as the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy to ensure the reliability and availability of critical infrastructure including nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. In June 2025, Gecko announced it had reached unicorn status, with a valuation of $1.25 billion. Jake currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife, and four kids. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. You can read Jake's story on CNBC and in Fortune.