Jake Loosararian, Gecko Robotics | All-In Summit 2024

gecko robotics builds wall climbing robots and enterprise software to maintain and protect essential infrastructure he is the CEO and co-founder at Gecko robotics Jake thanks for joining me today every hour you save you're saving potentially millions of dollars Hardware is hard be very careful there's a lot of really important problem to solve there's so much sex appeal to building new things you got to get the business model right and the business model has to make a CEO or CFO give a there is a huge fire going on right now at Philadelphia Energy Solutions oh my gosh again look at this guys look at this video right now today the Navy

remains a formidable fighting force but even officers within the service have questioned its Readiness at a missile silo we visited time and frigid weather had clearly taken their toll developing right now gushing for hours with no end in sight thousands of barrels of crude oil spilling from a uh the report does an estimate of what the need is to bring the overall grade up to a b which is what the society sort of determines to be adequate and it's like $4.59 trillion [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah all right hi I'm Jake the founder and CEO of gecko robotics a company that makes robots and software to help diagnose the health of the built world now it started

in a college dorm my college dorm is now a company that manages over 500,000 of the world's most important and critical pieces of infrastructure now the structures that we use to power civilization have reached their useful life it's a huge problem and it's getting way worse but it's a problem that you probably don't think about very much but you should in New York for example there are over 177,000 Bridges most of which are in New York City and guess how many of those bridges are not in need of immediate repairs only six see maintaining things has always been an afterthought but that afterthought is now a 4.59 trillion domestic problem and by the way it's getting

worse it's holding us back for example the military spends 40% of their budget over $400 billion on maintenance not on building new things just keeping old things working and Fortune 500 companies will lose $1 1.5 trillion every single year because of catastrophic failures that were unpredictable and our best defense to stop that from happening hasn't changed in over 60 years it's this this is Joe and Joe's on a rope now Joe's armed with a handheld sensor and what looks like an excruciating wedgie now Joe is our best chance to ensure that pipelines don't explode that Bridges don't collapse that dams don't

fail and that airplanes don't disassemble mid-flight it's an impossible job unfortunately for Joe you see we obsess about how software has changed everything for everyone it's eating the world right it's important to remember that for the guys behind me it's actually never help them you see the data that we need to prevent catastrophes from happening in the built World simply doesn't exist and without data what can software do now I became obsessed with this problem in college I was studying electrical engineering and my obsession for energy took me to a local power plant in Pennsylvania I wanted to se

power was made and so I decided to dive in head first now I I actually dove in head first straight to this hole and when you got through this hole you got into a 200 foot tall steel tubed box the length and the width of a football field this is a power plant boiler and the boiler's job was to turn water into steam by getting really hot see the problem is as the plant manager Jeff told me that 40% of the time this boiler would be shut down because of pressure tube explosions it would cost them $2 million every single day they were down this is a small little power plant and so I asked Jeff how do you stop this from happening and he says well we send up

humans on ropes looking for invisible defects then he began to tear up and he told me a story about how his best friend fell and died the year before doing one of these inspections and he fell and died in the exact spot I was standing so I was floored by the story and so I had to do something about it so I went back to my college storm and started building the First wall cling robot now I armed this robot with ultrasonic sensors just like doctors use for sonograms and I deployed that robot into the boiler saving the plant manager Jeff $30 million just that year and I became absolutely obsessed with how we understand the health of the

built structures that we use every single day and so I started a company and I boot shaed that company for three years pouring my life savings into it I slept on my best friend's apartment floor and I was down to the last $100 two things happened within two weeks first I got an offer to buy the company from a company that makes power plants and then second two partners from a group called y combinator said that if I stay poor and kept on building the vision that one day gecko would change everything that we knew about built structures so I decided to stay poor and keep building the vision so we launched

the company in 2016 and we began to deploy the technology into the oil and gas manufacturing public infrastructure and even defense sectors we had to build robots that could climb and Traverse and get sensors into all different kinds of surfaces geometries conditions and once you have 500,000 assets you have to climb around you begin to iterate your robots really really well to be able to handle these kinds of environments and it became clear that contrary to popular belief from the VCS at the time the robots were the mo because they could get sensors to places that could never be gotten to before we can convert atoms into bits and so I wanted to double down

on that moat and so we started building robots that could fly swim crawl and walk up any surface we begin to build autonomous platform to arm those robots to be a to go to places so that humans didn't have to be in dangerous environments we built and became the best in the world of building ultrasonic sensors electromagnetic sensors as well as lasers to be able to see and understand what was going on inside of Steels composits and concrete we built fixed sensors that could stream live information and data sets to us both the health but also the operational conditions of those assets itself and we built an API platform for robots called

so that other robotic companies could actually be used on our platform and streaming data and information live to our customers and after 10 years of collecting data on almost every structure imaginable we launched Canal our Ai and Robotics powered operating platform to put those data layers to use for our customers you see when you start building software by first starting out with the data layers and then building up you're severely advantaged because you can build software from principles and our ontology now was able to affect folks from the ground level the guys on the ropes all the way through to the Executive Suite it was extremely

powerful but post is talking about it let's actually dive into an example so to do that I'm going to take you to Georgia to a manufacturing facility that me and you me and you use in the bathroom every single day now this facility has thousands of assets and billions of dollars worth of infrastructure and so they wanted us to prove out over 50 assets what we could actually do so I'm going to take you through one of those assets today a sulfuric acid tank so first what we do is we gather information about the asset by customers sending us their metadata and we build out a digital representation of that asset inside of

Canever and then we send in our robots first we use a drone you can see over here now the Drone is armed with with cameras that are doing a photog gometric scan of the asset it enriches the asset model itself being able to identify different kinds of defects using Point clouds so corrosion areas like over here we're able to categorize and locate and then dents and cracks as well enriching the data asset model we want to go further than that we incorporate other sorts of components like piping and pumps that you see here both in the inlet and Outlet this is extremely important and valuable because we keep on adding data layers and the next one

is a dog come here boy good dog hey everyone say hi please yeah there we go nice so let me let me pet him real quick he likes to be pet yeah good boy so this dog will walk around to dangerous environments gathering information about what's going on on the infrastructure now what's important also to understand is that because of an API platform for robots we've built an extensible way for a company like anybotics one of our partners to be able to gather information in data sets and this robot is extremely exciting because it's built to be explosion proof meaning it can go inside of oil and gas facilities nuclear facilities and Beyond

it's gathering information like you see above thermal imaging to understand what's going on with the asset all this data is really important when we do optimizations later now we want to begin to continue to gather more information about the asset so we send in submersible robots these submersible robots are looking at the deformation because of the weight the liquid as well as the health of the assets floor to prevent things like that um oil tanker leaking into rivers and once we've gotten this and the customer is really excited because we can do this W they're online we then send in our robots and we rise collecting information and data while the C while the customer's tanks

are still in operation now these robots that you see right here are armed with ultrasonic sensors cameras and the IMU on board to ensure that we can do this autonomously Gathering terabytes of data in 12 hours for this tank a process that used to take about a month to do while the asset was shut down costing millions of dollars and we can do this in a way as well that ensures we can localize data points to begin to run optimizations and in this case because these assets are supposed to be reaching their useful life or reached it we can extend the useful life of the infrastructure and so for this example we can tell them what to fix in five and 10 years to extend the useful life so

that this asset continues to be able to uh do its function opposed to having to replace it for $8 million which was what the plant thought they would have to do so once we do that predictive model we work with maintenance companies to ensure that they actually take action on that and we update the model to ensure that a source of Truth remains next we actually the customer actually wants us to begin to do other optimization so we use fix sensors like this that'll stream information about not just the health but also the operating condition of the facility you see when you're running a let's say a big manufacturing facility your goal is to figure out how

to make more product without having stuff blow up U because of a new operating condition now that's never before been possible because the data you've been able to work with has been from Joe on a rope and so you don't know if you change your throughput or make more product if that'll destroy the assets we're able to run optimizations now I'm going to show you that here so this customer was able to because we're streaming information and data from the pumps and from the asset itself we were able to figure out how to increase the throughput or make more product by about 5% more while only having to incur over 90 days an accelerated um an accelerated damage of

the asset of about two months equivalent to two months and so we proved that we could do that by actually lowering the fill Heights in the tank and increasing the acid concentration level you can see the optimization being run right behind me now this was significant because of the ability to not just extend the useful life but actually produce more while not having the potential risk of a catastrophic failure something never before possible for these companies now let's talk about the outcomes for the customer on average over the 50 assets we extended the useful Life by 10 years this affects their p&l and their margin right away

because of ability to extend your depreciation models and then we created $15 million um of value by being able to reduce safety risks as well as Environmental as well as being able to reduce the amount of CBS that customers needed to spend and the estimated from the customer was a 4% impact to their margin now all of this optimization and information coming in doesn't just help the customer it also helps can lever be exceptional in a compounding way at running facilities more efficiently and so now you have an ability to have an unfair Advantage from from companies that are not utilizing technology like this so not just are robots cool but they're actually solving a business

problem so this has been flying off the shelf as you can imagine since we launched Canever this year the 12th largest oil and gas company in the world for example determined that they have 100,000 tanks and that we could provide $122,000 of Roi per tank now initially we signed a $30 million contract it's exciting it's going to extend to 100 million but it shows how if you adopt technology in a way like this it's unfair now on the defense side we're working with the uh Air Force on $130 billion modernization program now they have to modernize over 400 nuclear missile silos and the best way to determine how to modernize or what the

scope was to improve the missile silos was I kid you not Joe on a rope with a hammer who was listening to the sound that the silos made when he hit it so now gecko is helping to improve what the modernization scope actually should be and it points out something interesting those that are determining the scope and size of these modernization Pro projects are the same ones incentivized for that amount of dollars to be as high as it can be now on the Navy side one of the biggest problems is only a third of our ships are available to patrol and deter conflict around the world and the reason why is because of Maintenance Cycles so we worked with uh the Navy to

improve in this case it was Joe on a skateboard on his belly over a flight deck looking at different different areas trying to gather information and data set we improve that to be able to reduce labor by 85% and improve the turnaround times for Flight deex Alone by about a month so now we're doing tens of Millions with a navy on flight decks and we're extending that to ballast tanks hulls as well as commercial Maritime it's really exciting and then on the energy manufacturing sector that's where most of our 78 Fe accounts lie with big contracts like xon BP and Beyond now one thing that's extremely exciting is that it turns out if

pipelines explode or when oil leaks into rivers it's pretty bad for the environment so the studies show that by 2030 in the US you can reduce emissions by about 18% if you can stop those kind of things from happening so technology is available today to make a drastic impact on Net Zero and then it turns out as well if you're the best in the world of understanding the health of built structures you're actually very advantaged in building new things and so that's what the Admiral in charge of $132 billion nuclear um submarine project called the Columbia class determined so now we're helping to create the most advanced submarine in

the world from the beginning to the production end and it gives you a peak into what's coming now this is why it matters you see I'm not crazy building robotics Material Science AI software sensor company it's really freaking hard um but I had no choice you see the promise of AI from AI compan to make impacts in these industries have gone empty for years and years and years and it's no wonder why they're building their foundational models off of Joe's data data that looks like this this is a real report from one of our customers before they used gecko it's no wonder that AI hasn't made the

impact in of the promise that it was supposed to so this is why we built geeko and why I believe because of software being commoditized that first order data companies will dominate the next 10 and 20 years in software and my journey through the rust has given me both a pragmatism and optimism about the future a future where understanding how things work helps you build new things understanding how to use Ai and Robotics in these real practical ways a reality where we can understand the health of the built structures all around us just as as well as we

understand our own health and you begin to see robots of course in normal society but these robots won't be built for doing back flips or folding laundry they're going to be built to help realize the impact of AI for the built world with systems like Canever thank you thank you that was awesome yeah come here puppy oh David Zach showed up everybody doggy hey Z that's a robotic dog it's kind you're kind of dog oh go to sax go to sax go give him a kiss oh there we go SX is very affectionate so you can pet him if you want David you can pet him s here where where do you pet him exactly there you

go that was a lot of love yeah I am experiencing oh companionship from this excited yeah it's definitely it's definitely a nice dog yeah nice dog doesn't bitey I think one thing that would be great based on the kinds of customers you have can you tell us a little bit about the sales life cycle and the type of deals you do I mean it's so interesting to is it like an Enterprise software type sale and you know when you're going in and doing physical work I mean I didn't know where to sit were you worried about the dog no this was it's a very poorly organized conference yeah let's talk about that yeah we we only told you where to sit

five times in the last four minutes but I don't understand these images I have you know literally we go in there after and like Sergey comes he does his first thing and I'm like Ser oh yeah do you have any food I go out to the food and it's just like rubber conference chicking in the VIP speaker area and I'm like free birg can we just get some sushi from noou we should go through all the details yeah no tell us about the sales life cycle so what are the kinds of deals you not talking about rubber chicken right now we've got a panel uh but yeah tell us about the sales life cycle the juice has been really good by the way I like thank you um yeah so so the life cycle it's been it's been it's

been wild so you know gecko actually became profitable in 2017 right after YC's launch in 2016 and so you were a YC company yes 2016 and um what was interesting about that was you know we decided to build a company very for deployed so instead of building robots and Labs actually funny story one of the VCS you had here last year offered a bunch of money at YC um for us not to leave and go back to Pittsburgh and do this forward deployed motion of building robots but instead build it in a lab and I turned that down because I just fundamentally didn't believe in that way of building and so um but so we decided to launch into the um and build robots like

I've literally soldered in these environments um before and and just figure out how to make the robots work in reality in the real world and so the sales motion was basically we would go to the plant managers sometimes I'd call and be like hey my pizza guy like you know where's the where's the plan manager can I talk to him and I'd get figure out how to get to the plan managers and then I'd uh convince them to let us work with them in their facilities and so started out that way by selling to the folks who need this the most yeah and so but now I'm talking to um obviously CTO and and CFOs because our products are actually very Financial

um it helps with depreciation models it helps with optimizations but we started by just selling to the folks in the ground and building the robot um by failing a bunch of times there and fixing it live but now we have uh a great platform and so now when customers buy gecko the only way they can buy it is through software so they buy a can lever and they bought they buy an implementation of the software which is the robots getting the data and then they pay for a license um for the software and we try to make data refreshes which is basically robots going out and collecting more information free is there a custom is there a custom deployment in every one

of these because they've all got to have different facilities and how hard is it to kind of customize or do you have standard standardization now in each deployment they kind of do a Chinese menu type selection we try so so it's a great question we we started in the beginning by letting the customers pick what kinds of data layers they want they want so data layers basically mean what kind of robots now we actually don't allow them to do that we follow all the standards whatever like API which is like these governing bodies about how to take care of your infrastructure um but

then we go way beyond that because I want to create an incredible user experience that they cannot revert back from Jak there's um there's all kinds of crippling infrastructure problems around the world that are not necessarily tied to some of the obvious Industries like oil and gas so I'll give you two examples one was what happened in Baltimore where you know this who knows how it happened but basically the bridge just collapsed in a situation that and maybe it was supposed to be and and it did another example was a few years ago in genua in Italy an entire slab of a bridge just collapsed and it fell on top of uh um an environment and killed a

bunch of innocent civilians so there's I think a public safety requirement here which is like some of this stuff was either designed poorly or designed very quickly how much of that is observable by these kinds of robots and how do you convince folks that Beyond depreciation and Financial motivations there's a you know a real need to make sure that this public infrastructure is safe and you guys can secure it um great question so the answer to of how can we actually get information on those types of incidents is yes um we we like you can look at a concrete bridge and say hey there's some Decay here or there's something that's happening in the giring here and you can

recognize that and learn and be able to say wait a minute you need to send inspectors or shut the bridge down or stop and figure this out you first want to do so what the robots are really good at is getting a crap ton of data about the assets and then you can pinpoint exactly where to put fixed sensors in specific locations that would be indicative but then also because of our of of our you know we have this like really interesting data set that tells us because of so many different types of U situations um what kinds of potential issues are occurring that we can extrapolate out to these types of situations that we might be not as

familiar with so we'll put fixed sensors on to give us indication and give us an ability to help prioritize spending and so um you know we just actually signed a a contract with Governor Shiro to do this for bridges in elany county in Pennsylvania where Pittsburgh is and um we're helping to modernize um Bridge maintenance and prioritization of budget because what you can see here is you don't necessarily need to rebuild stuff and in some ways that's not even practical but you can figure out where to deploy Capital um and then by way did you see this video on X where somebody was going

through the Lincoln Tunnel and it looked like it was about to burst there was like water creaking in it was really disconcerting yeah but I think it was more of a design feature to actually like alleviate when times when the water levels were super high but my point is there's all of the stuff that we interact with that it would be good to know that there's a you know a service out there looking for it and is is there a world where you could also then theoretically ingest like the actual architectural orad of these things and then also be able to do diffs and VAR and be able to tell people hey hold on a second this is not conforming to how we

thought it should be behaving yes we do we do pull those in as much as we can but it's important to remember that most of the infrastructure that I'm talking about is like 60 years old um now on the new build side like for the new Columbia class submarines for example um there's an issue where like there's not a digital thread you have like 5,000 different contractors that are trying to make us most powerful sub in the world and they're handing paper to each other um as they build the submarine and so causes one a big a bunch of delays and issues which we're seeing with a lot of our ability like China for example can outbuild Us by 232 times uh submarines that is or or new chips and it's a a big

part of like our our like we have to be able to figure out how to be smarter when we manufacture and so one of the ways you can do that is digital threads all the way through the manufacturing process so that we're not like delayed by handing paper to each other that may or may not be incorrect and for the customers that we work with you know most of them you know you're looking at drawing that are 60 years old they have never been converted um I we even try to get asset lists from customers and they like we don't have it so we have to go out and actually build that for them how should we build a submarine just off topic how should we build it yeah so we don't have 5,000 contractors at well 1%

or 2% the speed of China it's a good it's a good question I think we should Orient our most efficient um way of building as many components in one place as we can but you have to remember as well you know Congressional members have their own constituents to advocate for and so they want to bring jobs to their to the local communities and so in a in a democracy it's really tough actually MH Jake how do you see um where your Bots your robots and let's say the more traditional generalized humanoid robots intersect when when they meet how do you think about that problem oh it's a great question um I am so excited to buy as many Optimus robots as possible yeah you're a customer you'll

be a customer 100% you're not going to be a competitor no no no I mean um look at anybotics right here so this is a this is a swed it's a company based in Switzerland that have an incredible robot and their data doesn't know where to go and so the idea of robots this is what I firmly believe is that taking them home today is that um you know they get sensors to places that are really hard to get sensors to and so that information has to be funneled um somewhere to drive some large business outcome so I really don't think like you know I I'm not of the belief I guess that when Elon talks about you know two times the amount of um robots as humans that you'll see them in society actually

as much as you maybe you'd think I think they're actually going to be found mostly in these like really dangerous behind the scenes industrial settings which I in my opinion that's like where they should start for sure because you'll have to you one you have to those are really complex tasks but two they're like very beneficial for Humanity um so like is there is there a generalized platform that you've built that allows you to solve for these different use cases or do you find that there's a lot of application specific engineering that's required good question so we we we built an API platform for robots where um companies can try their systems

out and we can because we have a go a market we can now test if that robot is producing something valuable from a data side right and I'm am not actually as interested in robots I can weld or robots I can clean right now mostly I'm just interested in just like what kind of information and data can we build better operating platforms and systems on and um so that's that's where I'm starting and we'll begin to add more robots that can do different kinds of jobs but um you know I think it's you have I think this is where first ordered data sets and and and software companies are become more and more you know powerful this is why maybe you know um my opinion on on like the the Standalone

SAS model is like I think it's going away um because the companies that are so advantaged with first order data you can you know just build your own software have a capital markets last question have Capital markets kind of embraced the story or things you can invest okay yeah um yeah they they really are I think um because there's a lot of this like hesitation around deep Tech and Hardware historically but you've obviously got an incredible software layer and great recurring business so you seem to be pretty differentiated in terms of a lot of the Long Haul build cycles that I think we see out there and it's yeah in Hardware in our case it's very sticky

yeah because you know once you convert from you know paper and you're now not using binders you're using can yeah um it's it's really hard to go back yeah I just yeah I think it's we've talked before and I think what you're doing is so inspiring because it feels to me like this technology you know that we've seen over the last 20 years in iPhones in EVS in sensors um is now allowing us to move from being reactive and trying to figure out what happened to then saying hey let's be proactive what are the opportunities here to extend life to say you know extend the life of these assets um and avoid tragedies and I just you know I think the work you're doing is a real

Grinder's work but it's going to save lives and it's going to really save taxpayers money that could be deployed in other places for beautiful things and so I just want to commend you on doing something that is so essential um in many times I meet a founder and they are doing something and I just think God I I don't know if this is going to work or not but I know that this founder is going to figure out a way to make it work and I I think it's just really rare that somebody cares so much about something and then executes as hard as you have um and I just want to tell you I personally very much appreciated it because you know when a bridge collapses

I know the one in Italy it's it was a very big tragedy I think it killed 50 odd people and it was privately owned yeah and there's a you know very very wealthy family that owned it and ultimately sadly no repercussions yeah same with dams in Brazil same with dams in Brazil right so you know as public infrastructure becomes private infrastructure then the profit motive supersedes a safety motive you're going to get all these things unless there's um um some sort of check and balance so long way of saying we very much appreciate this hard work that you've dedicated last question yeah you're you're you know you you've been in the YC Community for a long time just really

you don't have to say yes or no but have you ever been forced to do any founder mode did you feel pressure have you just just blink twice Jake just tell us the truth Jake thank you for joining us Jake that's awesome that was awesome that was excellent