Gecko Robotics doubles its valuation to $1.25 billion in a Cox-led Series D as navies and power plants buy its inspection data

Gecko Robotics, the Pittsburgh company that sends wall-climbing robots across boiler walls, tanks and ship hulls to gather inspection data, said on 12 June 2025 that a Series D round had valued it at $1.25 billion. The company said the figure was double the valuation of its previous funding round. That makes Gecko one of a small group of American industrial robotics start-ups to reach a billion-dollar price on the strength of maintenance and inspection work rather than humanoid prototypes.

Cox Enterprises led the round as a new investor, according to Gecko's announcement. Existing backers USIT, XN, Founders Fund and Y Combinator also took part. Gecko's own release does not give the amount of cash raised, and the law firm Goodwin, which said it advised Gecko on the financing, described the deal only by its $1.25 billion valuation. MEKAWIRE therefore does not report a round size.

Gecko said the capital would accelerate growth in three markets it named explicitly, defence, energy and manufacturing. The company built the announcement around its operating platform, Cantilever, and a hardware and software line it calls AIR, short for AI plus robotics. Its robots climb, fly and swim to collect data on structures such as U.S. Navy warships, power plants and public infrastructure, the release said, and Cantilever turns that data into recommended actions. Gecko gave three examples of such decisions: predicting pipeline explosions, modernising a C-130 aircraft and running a power plant at 3% to 5% greater efficiency.

The release also listed the commercial threads behind the price. Gecko pointed to its partnership with NAES to modernise the energy sector, a new extended reality product developed with L3Harris Technologies and growing work with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. When NAES and Gecko announced their deal on 27 February 2025, they said the initial agreement exceeded $100 million with potential to grow beyond $250 million. NAES describes itself as America's largest independent power operator, with 65 gigawatts under management.

Jake Loosararian, Gecko's co-founder and chief executive, said in the release that the company designed Cantilever around an ontology that questions the integrity of incoming data, because in the built world, as he put it, data is guilty until proven innocent. He said a lack of quality data on physical infrastructure explained the surge in demand for Gecko. Andrew Davis, senior vice president of strategy and investments at Cox Enterprises, said Cox backs durable companies solving complex, high-value problems. Trae Stephens, a partner at Founders Fund, said Gecko was applying AI to building and maintaining critical infrastructure while much of the technology industry chased consumer applications.

The jump is steep against Gecko's disclosed history. In March 2022 the company said it had raised $73 million in a Series C led by XN at a post-money valuation of $533 million, with Founders Fund, XYZ, Drive Capital and Snowpoint Ventures among the investors. On 5 December 2023 it added $100 million to that round, taking the Series C to $173 million, and gave board seats to Gaetano Crupi of USIT and Trae Stephens of Founders Fund. That extension release did not state a valuation. Measured against the 2022 post-money figure, the Series D price is about 2.35 times higher.

Defence has become the clearest engine of that growth. Gecko pitched the 2023 extension at faster maintenance cycles for Navy surface ships, the Columbia-class submarine programme and the Air Force's modernisation of Sentinel missile silos. Nine months after the Series D, on 17 March 2026, Gecko said it had won a five-year IDIQ contract with a $71 million ceiling and a $54 million initial award to assess and maintain 18 ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, including destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships. The company said its technology identifies repairs 50 times faster than manual methods.

Inspection robotics has drawn heavy capital on both sides of the Atlantic. Swiss quadruped maker ANYbotics raised a $50 million Series B in May 2023 and a further $60 million in December 2024 to drive U.S. expansion. FieldAI, which develops autonomy software for robots in industrial field sites, said in August 2025 that it had raised more than $400 million across two consecutive rounds. Exyn Technologies, which builds robotic autonomy for GPS-denied environments, raised a $35 million Series B in 2022 and closed a Nasdaq listing in May 2026. Gecko is the only one of the group to publish a billion-dollar private valuation from its own newsroom.

The technology difference is one of emphasis. Legged rivals sell mobility, a robot that can walk a plant on a schedule and read gauges or listen for leaks. Gecko started with a robot that climbs vertical steel carrying inspection sensors, which yields dense measurements of surfaces that are otherwise sampled by hand, and it now adds drones, robot dogs and fixed sensors, according to the NAES release. The hardware is treated as a data feeder. The product Gecko charges for is the Cantilever layer that stores the asset history, flags degradation and recommends repairs.

The risks sit in the same places as the opportunity. Gecko's growth leans on government buyers whose budgets and procurement timetables it cannot control, and its largest disclosed contracts are framework agreements whose ceilings exceed the money committed up front. The undisclosed round size also leaves outsiders unable to judge how much of the $1.25 billion price was paid in fresh capital. Competitors with cheaper mobile platforms are pushing into the same plant budgets, and customers may resist storing sensitive asset data on a single vendor's platform.

The next milestones are already dated. The Navy contract runs for five years from March 2026, and Gecko's release ties its work to the Navy's goal of 80% fleet readiness by 2027. The NAES agreement was framed with headroom beyond $250 million. In November 2025 Gecko signed three agreements with ADNOC and its technology venture AIQ, including a multi-year rollout of Cantilever across ADNOC Gas assets, and on 28 September 2026 it said it was adopting NVIDIA's OpenShell software to put enforceable limits on the AI agents that drive its robots.