How I built my unlikely multimillion-dollar startup

This story is part of CNBC Make It’s The Moment series, where highly successful people reveal the critical moment that changed the trajectory of their lives and careers, discussing what drove them to make the leap into the unknown.

Jake Loosararian’s nine-figure business might’ve never existed if he’d listened to the people he trusts most.

As students at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College in 2012, Loosararian and his electrical engineering classmates were asked to build robots that could climb and scan a local power plant’s walls for costly issues like cracks or corrosion. His team built a 40-pound robot with an ultrasonic scanner that collected data in dirty and dangerous environments more efficiently than human workers ever could.

Their creation saved the power plant tens of millions of dollars in labor costs and productivity, says Loosararian. He floated the idea of turning it into a business to his family and professors.

“Everyone said, ‘Don’t f—ing do it,'” Loosararian says.

Such a company would be a major longshot: Loosararian had very little work experience or seed money, and no tech industry connections. Roughly 70% of hardware startups either shutter or fail to grow, mostly due to how long it typically takes to get a product to market and build a reliable customer base, according to CBInsights.

But few tech companies seemed focused on Loosararian’s niche of inspecting critical infrastructure. He believed he’d stumbled onto “a secret hiding in plain sight,” he says.

After graduating college in 2013, Loosararian co-founded Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics. He worked 100-hour weeks to save “$30,000 or $40,000” and fund his startup’s first few years of existence, he says. He spent a lot of that time in some dark places — going broke, sleeping on friends’ floors and climbing inside power plant boilers, which are “dirty and horrible,” he notes. Repeatedly, he almost walked away.

Today, Gecko Robotics is a fast-growing robotics company with $220 million in funding, including a $100 million fundraising round last year that valued Gecko at $633 million. The startup, with Loosararian at the helm, ranked 42nd on the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 List, which released in May.

Here, Loosararian discusses why he believed he’d seen something that nobody else did, the challenge of funding his startup without investors or family money, and the “I will not die” mentality he developed to succeed.

CNBC Make It: Did you immediately believe you had a major tech startup on your hands after building a successful robot in college? Did you get advice from anyone?

Loosararian: I talked to a bunch of people after that project — my parents, my siblings, people who had started companies before, people I looked up to from a technology standpoint, like professors. Everyone said, “Don’t f—ing do it. There’s not a big market here.” It was very clearly a bad idea. 

I’m not a very smart individual, but I just began to think: It seems like the robots are an incredible way to localize and gather information using sensors that couldn’t get to these places without robotic systems. Customers will pay me to collect and own that data on their assets, which no one else has access to.

It seemed like that was a secret hiding in plain sight. And, more importantly, it was a really important [problem] no one else was solving for. So, if not me, then who else was going to solve it?

How did you get the funds to get started?

I didn’t come from a super well-off family. I had, maybe, $15,000 [in savings]. I knew that wasn’t enough to start the company, and I had no idea you could get people to give you money for equity in a company that was still worthless.

I took a job doing systems automation. The first day I got in there, I sat at my cubicle and was like, “Aw, get me the hell out of here!” I spent 50 to 60 hours a week at my job, and about 40 to 50 hours at Gecko. My weekends were at power plants, and in the lab building the robot.

A year to the day I joined [that job], I quit. I think I ended up saving $30,000 or $40,000. I was like, “Thank God. I have enough money to bootstrap the thing.”

You had a co-founder that first year. What happened?

[Gecko Robotics co-founder Orion Correa] poured his life-savings into it, too. He worked on it full-time. The week before I quit my other job, he said: “Jake, I can’t do this anymore. Mentally, I’m exhausted. It’s just never going to go anywhere and I have to get out.”

That was hard.

But I was so obsessed with this problem. So, I bought his 50% stake for $2,500, or something like that — an insurmountable amount of dollars for me at that time. It killed me, because I didn’t have much money to give.

We’re still friends today. He’s fantastic. But, then it was all me bootstrapping [until Gecko joined tech accelerator YCombinator in 2016]. That led to some pretty dark moments.

What were some of the toughest moments in those early years?

I was down to my last dollars. My best friend was living in a crummy basement apartment. There was a section behind his couch and I was like, “Can I take that?” I laid the mattress down. That was where I slept for, like, two and a half years.

Sometimes [the tech] wouldn’t work, so I would literally be in these dirty and horrible environments, like the power plant boiler — a box that gets really hot and super eerie. It’s probably what Hell is like. If your robot is s—ing the bed and not working, you’ve got to fix that. I’m literally soldering circuit boards in that environment, with all of this dust, and then I’m coding, trying to make the robot work, and nothing’s working.

Did you ever consider walking away? What ultimately stopped you?

Yeah. The worst-case scenario was: People were right. This is a stupid idea. You’re wasting years of your life after working so hard up to this point. The fear was just being a failure.

Going back to that cubicle was a really scary thing. But I realized that I’d rather be in a deep, dark place being in charge of my own fate than in a cubicle and subject to someone else’s.

What helped me get through it was spending time with customers and hearing how important the problem was to solve. I’m helping them understand how to refine and create barrels of oil at higher margins, while reducing environmental and human safety risks and increasing the longevity of their assets. I’m trying to make sure bridges don’t collapse.

That gave me the encouragement I needed to feel I wasn’t just fooling myself.

Did having those doubts, and pushing past them, help solidify your resolve to stick it out?

You just dig deeper into: Why am I really doing this?

It allowed me to have an “I will not die” mentality. Determination and persistence sound good to say, but you don’t know what they actually mean until you’re down in the trough of despair, if you will. Until you are there repeatedly and get comfortable there.

I know what the bottom feels like. I don’t mind if I go back. So, I’m just going to put all the chips on the table. I don’t care if I look like an idiot. If I believe there’s a right thing to do, I’m going do it.

That actually is a superpower. Those scars allow you to act with confidence, courage and a will to make [your goals] become reality. That’s a very helpful thing. It was only possible through that refinement of going through hell.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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