Gecko Robotics lands $71M Navy deal

"Roughly 40% of the United States Navy's fleet is unavailable at any given time. Ships are queued in dry dock. Maintenance cycles stretch across months. The cost of the backlog, according to Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian, runs somewhere between $13 billion and $20 billion annually. And as he puts it, 'at a time when you need every asset you can get, that's pretty critical.'"

"Gecko's wall-climbing robots, drones, and sensors will crawl across hulls, decks, and welds, gathering data points that would take human inspectors weeks to collect. That raw data feeds into Cantilever, the company's AI-powered operating platform, which converts it into a detailed digital twin of each vessel: a living, updatable model of the ship's structural health."

"The company says its technology can identify necessary repairs up to 50 times faster and more accurately than manual inspection techniques. Critically, the inspection can happen before a ship even reaches dry dock, meaning the right parts and personnel can be staged in advance, rather than the process beginning."

Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh startup, secured a five-year contract with the US Navy valued at $54 million initially, with a ceiling of $71 million, to deploy AI-powered digital twin technology across 18 Pacific Fleet vessels. The Navy faces a critical maintenance crisis with approximately 40% of its fleet unavailable at any given time, costing between $13 billion and $20 billion annually. Gecko's wall-climbing robots, drones, and sensors will inspect ship hulls, decks, and welds to gather comprehensive data. This data feeds into Cantilever, the company's AI platform, which creates detailed digital twins representing each vessel's structural health. The technology identifies necessary repairs up to 50 times faster and more accurately than manual inspections, enabling advance staging of parts and personnel before ships enter dry dock.

Read at TNW | Deep-Tech