The White House recently declared a national emergency around the country’s aging and unreliable grid infrastructure. Gecko Robotics is betting that its fleet of wall-climbing robots, drones, and robot dogs might be part of the rescue effort.
The Pittsburgh-based startup just inked a $100 million deal with national power operator North American Energy Services (NAES) that will deploy Gecko’s robots to help modernize power plants across the country. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro also lent his support in a press conference announcing the partnership, which has the option of growing up to $250 million depending on demand.
“To me, it is critically important that we get this done, and that we’re able to take [Gecko’s] idea and grow it into the national leader that is building robots for one of the nation’s largest energy suppliers, NAES,” Shapiro said in the press conference. “And I gotta tell you, this is really incredibly important work right now.”
The deal comes as the country faces a rush of new power demand driven in part by massive growth in AI data centers and ongoing electrification efforts. But experts say America’s aging power and electrical grid infrastructure is hardly up to the task in its current form.
“This is a critical moment for energy in America; I truly feel this cannot be overstated,” NAES CEO Mark Dobler said during a press conference. “Coming from someone who’s been in this sector for over 30 years, demand growth in the near future will be unprecedented.”
Gecko’s robots feed data into an AI-powered software platform called Cantilever, which is able to flag health issues within power plants and boost their performance. The startup’s client roster already includes industrial giants like Marathon Petroleum and Siemens Energy. Gecko claims its tech can cut the need for reactive maintenance by 80% and double the lifespan of industrial assets.
Gecko Robotics
“We’ll be powering [NAES] operations platform using Cantilever,” Gecko CEO and co-founder Jake Loosararian told Tech Brew. “They’ll be starting out with a few facilities. We’re trying to keep it nearby—Pennsylvania and the surrounding states as well. But then in the next 12 to 24 months, [we’ll] begin to deploy that to more and more facilities within the NAES portfolio as they expand it.”
The partnership will extend beyond just bringing Gecko’s tech to NAES plants. The two companies say they want to work together to attract new technical hires, investments in grid modernization, and government support.
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Attracting top talent to an industry not seen as particularly flashy is a big roadblock, according to Loosararian and Dobler, who cited a stat that a quarter of plant operators are set to retire within the next five to ten years.
“Our industry is not a modern one, but it’s one of the most important,” Dobler said. “An incredible amount of talent and experience [is] leaving the industry. To further compound this issue, ours has historically not been viewed as technology-centric, and therefore we struggle to compete for top talent from…our schools and universities.”
Loosararian characterized his close partnership with Dobler as an unlikely duo in some ways: “Typically, you wouldn’t have a tech CEO and a guy who runs power plants come together.” But that image of the power industry will need to change in order for big grid modernization investments to actually pay off, he said.
“The biggest risk right now is with all these announcements of investments. And you see manufacturing, you know, ‘We’re gonna invest $100 billion here. We’re gonna invest $500 billion there.’...That sounds awesome. But like, look, guys, the people who know how to run these facilities—[around 33%] of them are 55 or above,” Loosararian said. “And for every four employees that leave, one gets hired right now. So it’s not exactly the most exciting industry to go into if you’re a really ambitious, smart engineer coming out of college, and we’re trying to reverse that trend.”
Loosararian said the industry is recognizing some of the looming problems with the power infrastructure, and major investment deals like the one between Gecko and NAES are becoming more commonplace as money is poured into modernization efforts.
“This year has been a year where there’s been a real large shift in these manufacturing and energy sectors, where people are really trying to figure out, ‘How do I solve a really large problem?’” he said. “And so there’s been a large influx of these sorts of deal types coming into Gecko right now. And so now it’s challenging a lot of our growth plans. So we’re looking to hire way more. We’re looking to invest more of the capital from our revenues into specific locations.”