Gecko Robotics CEO: How I bucked the trend of Silicon Valley’s monopoly on frontier tech
My journey to building an AI and robotics company started, believe it or not, in a Costa Rican rainforest. As an electrical engineering student in 2013 at Grove City College, Pennsylvania, my buddy and I were backpacking when I saw a gecko climbing a shower wall. That image sparked the name for what would become Gecko Robotics.
Back in Pittsburgh, I had recently visited a local power plant run by a former college alumni who was suffering from persistent downtime at the facility, costing millions. This was my first experience seeing energy infrastructure and experiencing the vast scale, old structures, and poor conditions. During that visit, I learned that someone had recently fallen and died where I stood while trying to find structural defects at elevated heights. I knew there had to be a better way.