Gecko Robotics lands $71M Navy deal to send wall-climbing robots inside warships

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 ...