33-year-old once worked 100-hour weeks to save $40,000 for his robotics startup—now it’s worth $633 million
This story is part of CNBC Make It’s The Moment series, where highly successful people reveal the critical moment that changed the trajectory of their lives and careers, discussing what drove them to make the leap into the unknown.
Jake Loosararian’s nine-figure business might’ve never existed if he’d listened to the people he trusts most.
As students at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College in 2012, Loosararian and his electrical engineering classmates were asked to build robots that could climb and scan a local power plant’s walls for costly issues like cracks or corrosion. His team built a 40-pound robot with an ultrasonic scanner that collected data in dirty and dangerous environments more efficiently than human workers ever could.
Their creation saved the power plant tens of millions of dollars in labor costs and productivity, says Loosararian. He floated the idea of turning it into a business to his family and professors.
“Everyone said, ‘Don’t f—ing do it,’” Loosararian says.
Such a company would be a major longshot: Loosararian had very little work experience or seed money, and no tech industry connections. Roughly 70% of hardware startups either shutter or fail to grow, mostly due to how long it typically takes to get a product to market and build a reliable customer base, according to CBInsights.
But few tech companies seemed focused on Loosararian’s niche of inspecting critical infrastructure. He believed he’d stumbled onto “a secret hiding in plain sight,” he says.
After graduating college in 2013, Loosararian co-founded Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics. He worked 100-hour weeks to save ”$30,000 or $40,000″ and fund his startup’s first few years of existence, he says. He spent a lot of that time in some dark places — going broke, sleeping on friends’ floors and climbing inside power plant boilers, which are “dirty and horrible,” he notes. Repeatedly, he almost walked away.
Today, Gecko Robotics is a fast-growing robotics company with $220 million in funding, including a $100 million fundraising round last year that valued Gecko at $633 million. The startup, with Loosararian at the helm, ranked 42nd on the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 List, which released in May.
Here, Loosararian discusses why he believed he’d seen something that nobody else did, the challenge of funding his startup without investors or family money, and the “I will not die” mentality he developed to succeed.
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