The infrastructure-scaling machines from Gecko Robotics Inc. collect troves of data, sometimes reaching several terabytes — or hundreds of thousands of images — worth of data per customer project.
It's data that can be used by the military to determine where repairs are needed on warships or by oil companies looking to identify potential weak points in their pipelines.
But all of this data collection has now become even more powerful as the North Side-based company has unveiled its new Cantilever product that, with the power of artificial intelligence, will allow its customers to have easier access to analysis and tools that can aid in decision making. This improves on the evaluation of the health of the various assets Gecko's robots are capable of scaling and scanning given all the data that has been scrubbed from these entities.
Jake Loosararian, CEO and co-founder of Gecko, described Cantilever as "the primary operating system for the physical world" and pitched the in-house-made product as a powerful addition to the suite of products Gecko offers. The product has been a working concept that dates back to Gecko's origins nearly a decade ago but one that could only be realized now given advancements in computational power, machine learning algorithms and AI.
"For the last two and a half to three years, we've truly invested extremely heavily — you could see this in the fundraising and the hiring of such incredible folks that have built these kinds of products in other sectors before — into a software that is able to actually take this arbitrage of mastering damaged things in the built world and actually creating the first instance of a predictive maintenance software tool that helps customers to see exactly what's going to fail and why and what to do to prevent things from failing," Loosararian said.
Gecko is billing Cantilever as being an intelligent tool that will allow people to make important decisions, like how to best optimize repairs with a given budget, which the company said will lead to an increase in uptime and a decrease in costs.
The U.S. Navy is an early adopter of Cantilever, Gecko said. Military officers and maintenance teams use Cantilever to create and then act on repair plans for ships in a matter of minutes instead of what previously took weeks or months to develop and implement.
Loosararian said Gecko, which employs about half of its 260-person workforce out of its Pittsburgh headquarters, started Cantilever's development with a team of about a dozen people who began the initial work on the product. The team has since grown to consist of about 50 people.
He's bullish Cantilever will serve as a critical tool for Gecko's present and future customers to come. He's also not worried about competition from other AI players that exist given Gecko's access to these large and unique data assets it has been able to log over the years via its customer base.
"There's so much important nuance and mastery of the information that we've been able to get because we've been deployed on the front lines at these facilities," Loosararian said. "It actually makes things incredibly difficult for the Silicon Valley or [software-as-a-service] companies or data infrastructure companies to actually be able to make an impact. And they've tried and failed in large part because of that."
Gecko has raised over $122 million in outside investment since it began taking on such funds in 2016, the most recent being a $73 million Series C funding round in March 2022.
