34-year-old built a $1.3 billion business after working 100-hour weeks to keep it alive: I got there by going through hell'

Jake Loosararian struggled for three years to get his artificial intelligence startup Gecko Robotics off the ground. He considered walking away, when a customer offered him $500,000 to buy the business in 2015.

Now, a decade later, the business is worth $1.25 billion — following a $125 million fundraising round led by Cox Enterprises, the company announced on June 12. The new funding round means Gecko's valuation has nearly doubled since December 2023, when it was valued at $633 million in a different fundraising round.

Gecko began in 2012, when Loosararian and some of his electrical engineering classmates at Pennsylvania's Grove City College built a 40-pound robot with an ultrasonic scanner to climb and scan a local power plant's walls, hoping to identify costly issues in need of repair, like cracks or corrosion. The robot ended up saving the power plant millions of dollars in productivity and labor costs, Loosararian told CNBC Make It on November 23.

Loosararian, Gecko's co-founder and CEO, decided to turn the school project into a full-time business after graduating in 2013 — hoping to build robots that could help inspect critical infrastructure of all kinds. He did it against the advice of his family and professors, he said.

“Everyone said, 'Don't f---ing do it,'” said Loosararian, whose company ranks No. 30 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list.

He spent nearly three years struggling to bootstrap Gecko, sleeping on friends' couches and facing bankruptcy while working 100-hour weeks, he said. Sometimes, his workplace was the “dirty and horrible” insides of power plant boilers, fixing early robot prototypes when they malfunctioned, he added.

Loosararian considered giving up and walking away multiple times during that stretch, he said. But he still figured that running his own company was better than working for someone else, and the more time he spent with Gecko's customers, the more he convinced himself that his business was viable, he said.

“What helped me get through it was spending time with customers and hearing how important the problem was to solve ... That gave me the encouragement I needed to feel I wasn't just fooling myself,” said Loosararian.

In 2016, Loosararian's resilience finally paid dividends when Gecko got accepted to Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, paving the way for the business to land seed funding from the accelerator and its network of investors.

Today, Gecko makes robots armed with AI technology that can climb walls, fly and even swim underwater to inspect and collect data on critical infrastructure like power plants, bridges, dams and military equipment. Its clients include the U.S. Navy, power plant operator NAES and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, according to the company.

Loosararian's early struggles only solidified his resolve to stick it out as a bootstrapping founder, he said: “Those scars allow you to act with confidence, courage and a will to make [your goals] become reality. That's a very helpful thing. It was only possible through that refinement of going through hell.”