Descriptions:
Bloomberg Technology interviews the founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics about the company’s newly announced $71 million contract with the U.S. Navy, deploying swarm robotics and AI to dramatically accelerate naval vessel inspection and maintenance.
Gecko’s robots — which fly, climb, and crawl across ship surfaces — collect structural condition data that traditionally requires three to four months of manual inspection, compressing that timeline while capturing datasets orders of magnitude larger than conventional methods. All data feeds into Cantilever, the company’s proprietary digital thread platform for critical infrastructure, enabling predictive maintenance scheduling and reducing unplanned downtime. The CEO, who founded the company from a college dorm room 13 years ago around the vision of ‘diagnosing the health of the built world,’ describes the same technology stack as already deployed at major energy clients including ADNOC.
The conversation addresses the U.S. Navy’s explicit goal of reaching 80% fleet readiness, the current administration’s focus on deploying AI capabilities today rather than in future planning horizons, and the competitive advantage Gecko’s approach provides over adversary navies. When asked to characterize Gecko’s core competency, the CEO frames it as the full pipeline: physical data acquisition through robotics, conversion of that data into actionable intelligence, and integration into infrastructure planning — positioning the company as neither purely a hardware nor software firm but an end-to-end industrial AI provider.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Technology · Published March 17, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
