The Pittsburgh startup’s AI platform will create digital twins of Pacific Fleet vessels, starting with 18 ships, as the Navy races to fix a maintenance crisis costing up to $20 billion a year.
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.”
On Tuesday, the Pittsburgh startup announced it had signed a five-year IDIQ (indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity) contract with the US Navy and the General Services Administration, with a ceiling of $71 million.
The initial award stands at $54 million. It is the largest contract the Navy has ever awarded Gecko Robotics , and the largest robotics deal the Navy has signed to date.
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The work begins immediately with 18 ships in the US Pacific Fleet, destroyers, amphibious warships, and littoral combat ships, over the next nine months. 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 only once the vessel is already out of service.
Defense One reported that just 41% of ships completed repairs on time in 2025, well short of the Navy’s 71% goal. The Navy has since reset its target to above 60%, with the broader ambition of reaching 80% fleet combat surge readiness by 2027.
Gecko’s contract structure is also notable for its scope: because it runs through the GSA, any branch of the Department of Defense can access the company’s AI and robotics under the agreement, not just the Navy.
“Readiness isn’t just a metric. It’s all that matters,” Loosararian said in a statement. “This growing partnership is about the unfair advantages Gecko is deploying to our Navy and how prediction, through our robotics and AI products, ensures our brave men and women are the most advantaged in the world in their fight to defend freedom.”
The contract arrives at a moment of heightened urgency around US shipbuilding capacity. The Trump administration released a multi-page plan in February to revive the sector, which has fallen significantly behind China. Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick, in a statement, said the deal demonstrated how “engineers, researchers, and skilled tradesmen from a great Pennsylvania company are leading advances in technology, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and robotics and giving our military the capabilities it needs for the next generation of American defence.”
Gecko is not new to the Navy. The company, co-founded by Loosararian and Troy Demmer, now its president, has previously deployed its TOKA series robots on destroyers, amphibious vessels, and aircraft carriers, and has worked with defence prime contractor L3Harris on digital twins for military aircraft.
Earlier this year it partnered with BPMI, a contractor for the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Programme, to cut inspection times on nuclear carrier and submarine components by up to 90%.
The company was last valued at $1.25 billion following a Series D round led by Cox Enterprises in June 2025, which brought its total funding to $173 million. It remains private. The TOKA robots that will crawl the Pacific Fleet’s hulls are the same ones Gecko has been deploying in power generation, oil and gas, and heavy manufacturing for years, the argument being that the physical world, whether it’s a coal boiler or a guided-missile destroyer, yields its secrets the same way: slowly, and only to whoever has the patience to look closely enough.
