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2025 Disruptor 50 list. And at number 30 is Gekko Robotics. Julia Boorstin is here with more on that. Good morning, Julia.
>> Good morning to you, Becky. Well, Gekko Robotics uses its AI-powered robots that can climb up wind turbines and into nuclear power plants to test critical infrastructure, including battleships, aircraft, gas refineries, and power plants. It analyzes the condition and readiness of those assets to get ahead on repairs and keep those assets operational. Gekko is at the intersection of AI, robotics, defense, and infrastructure. Some of the hottest industries for funding this year, which helps explain Gekko's news of the morning. The company has closed another round of funding, doubling its valuation to $1.25 billion. Joining us now, Jake Lucero, co-founder and CEO of Gekko Robotics. Jake, thanks so much for being here this morning.
>> Yeah, thanks for having me.
>> So tell us about this new funding round. How will you put it to work?
>> Well, thanks for having me on. For those that don't know, Gekko is a company that collects and diagnoses the health of built structures all around. Whether it's a bridge, a dam, an aircraft carrier, like you said, and it powers an AI-powered operating platform for our customers called Cantilever. So the funding round is to surge resources and energy around the most critical industries. That is creating a flywheel right now with the sale of Cantilever. And that's in the energy, manufacturing, and defense sectors.
>> You recently expanded your partnership with the Navy. You have a new partnership with L3 Harris. All of these partnerships, do you have the capacity to scale up and meet their needs right now?
>> We do. And it's because of this concept that came up with out of the college dorm about 12 years ago when I created Gekko. And it's about not building robots and selling them to our customers, but it's about using robots to collect unfair data advantages that power software and operating platform that no one else has and is able to compete with.
>> These things are so cool. They're like Spider-Man. They crawl all over the tank or the bridge or whatever it is, and they find structural weaknesses, which to me seems like one of the best use cases for AI, especially with an instant use case and people who are probably willing to pay for it.
>> Yeah, that's right. And one of our incredible customers is a mining company called Rio Tinto, and they spend about $4 billion a year on sustaining CapEx, for example. And so sustaining CapEx is just you have to deploy capital to make sure things continue to operate, and you can create the kind of products that you're supposed to be delivering. The problem is, their infrastructure is so old. And the US, for example, the US power grid has only four years left of useful remaining life. Of all the assets that power our grid. That's pretty scary. And so our job is to extend the useful life of those assets way beyond what they ever were supposed to. But when you're collecting that data, it actually helps power something way more exciting, which is an operating platform. So one thing that I'm working on with the power sector is how do you get 10 gigawatts of more power at the existing thermal in the US without building another power plant? And that's something that we've been able to prove out with the partnership with a group called NACE, which runs about 5% of the power in the US.
>> Okay, I love this idea. One thing that just popped into my head is, are you liable if you sign off on something and say, hey, this bridge is safe, this ship is safe, this tanker is safe, and there's a problem and a leak springs, an accident happens. Are you liable for that?
>> We're not liable. We have to follow all the standards and guidelines set out by API or ASME. These societies that set out here are the standards you have to abide by. And because we have a million times more information data, it's all localized using robots that are AI-powered. So what we're trying to do is create a representation with a real world. Looks like we talk about digital twins. What we do is we create what the real estate or the real reality of the of the power plant or the refinery or the or the ship looks like. And we represent that instead of Cantilever to make all these decisions around how to operate and also to build new infrastructure. Now, all of that's really important to document and interrogate something that's never actually existed before. So, you know, one thing that we've been getting a lot of attention around and we haven't gotten into the sector yet, but another act of the company is, how do we use this to underwrite better? Because right now you're.
>> Using the insurance.
>> Company very little information and data to underwrite, you know, billions and billions of dollars of not just physical stuff.
>> So if the power plant doesn't bring you in and pay you to do it, the insurance company might pay you to do it so they can figure out what to charge them on their liability.
>> We have 500,000 of the world's most critical assets managed inside of Cantilever, and you can imagine the information and data that we have about things that power large industries on the insurance and compliance side are very interested in the data sets that we have. So we don't do anything with that. But you can obviously imagine how important that information is.
>> Julia, this is pretty unique from your disruptors.
>> And I think what's so interesting is it's really sitting at the intersection of robotics and AI and infrastructure and really addressing real-world needs and using AI to power solutions.
>> Up to this point, it just was expensive to check everything, whether there's flaws, right? I mean, we're not there's flaws everywhere on all these things. It'd be nice to know about these.
>> Yeah. I think I mentioned when we were together at Sun Valley that there is a there's only six bridges in New York that are not in need of immediate repairs just to have you feel nice. Bridge. Those are. Yeah. And I started the company because. Yeah, I started the company because the people that were out there gathering information to detect. Is this going to fail or not? Whether it's a power plant or a bridge. Someone had fallen and died. And so that inspired me when I was in college, to build a company that could gather information and data, make it safe, but also figure out how to build new materials to power. In particular, the most important sectors that are existential risks. Today.
>> There'd be a lot more inspections and cheaper inspections. That's right, because there's not probably not enough.
>> Of these things can like crawl all over the undercarriage.
>> And one thing I might say.
>> Proactive repairs. Right.
>> That's right. And I think one thing that's interesting about our company is outside of Android, we're the place where the most Palantir, Palantir things go and the early Palantir. And the reason I'd say that is, you know, with Alex talks about ontology, right? Yeah, Alex talks about ontology. But what's important to realize about Gekko and how we think about building operating platforms with software is that you have to start with a we call it a data is guilty until proven innocent, meaning that we believe that you have to actually go out and gather information that's never existed before to power a software and an artificial intelligence-driven software, in particular, to help operate and build things better into the future. So we are building software by first gathering and owning this information data layer that's just never existed before. And this is why digitization and transformation, these sectors.
>> Predict something is ready to fail.
>> That's what.
>> That's that's like, you know what that's like 2001. Remember how said that there was wasn't? The poor guy went out to check it out. And he's still like this. You probably didn't see that either. You guys are so young. You're missing so much. Watch the Kubrick 2001.
>> Okay.
>> Watch it. All right.
>> You never lost a robot, right? Like you were talking about how your fear of heights on these things, you never, as one ever fallen off?
>> No. Never fallen off.
>> Yeah. I'm not going up with it.
>> No.
>> That's not that's not good enough.
>> You probably carry you up if you held up.
>> Nope. Nope. Nope.
>> Thank you.
>> I'm even goin