In 2015, Jake Loosararian had less than $135 in his bank account. A customer offered to buy his company for $500,000. He said no. CNBC reports that he had spent nearly three years bootstrapping Gecko Robotics, emptying his savings, sleeping on friends’ floors and soldering circuit boards in power-plant boiler rooms. His own description of the offer: “It’s damn hard to turn down half a million dollars when all you had was 100 bucks.” In June 2025 the company was valued at $1.25 billion.
This profile is about that decision and the next one, which was the same kind of decision at a bigger number.
The first no: $500,000
Gecko makes robots that climb the walls of boilers, tanks, pipelines and ships and scan them for corrosion and cracks. Its Fortune byline by Loosararian says the company’s name comes from a gecko he saw on a shower wall as an electrical engineering student at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. CNBC reports that it began as a university project and became his full-time business after he graduated in 2013.
The offer came from a customer, according to CNBC, which describes it as a company that built power plants. Loosararian called it “earth-shattering money for me” and rejected it. CNBC’s reporting does not give a single stated reason for the refusal. What he has said about getting through those years is about customers: “What helped me get through it was spending time with customers and hearing how important the problem was to solve.” Sources disagree slightly on timing: CNBC dates the offer to 2015, while a World Economic Forum profile snippet places it in 2016. We use CNBC’s year.
Y Combinator: $125,000 for 7%
By his own account in Fortune, a college friend, Troy Demmer, who later became his co-founder, told him to meet a venture partner from Y Combinator. Gecko took YC’s standard deal of $125,000 for 7%, which Fortune says implied a valuation of nearly $1.8 million. Y Combinator’s company page lists Gecko in its Winter 2016 batch.
The second no: $2 million at $10 million
Months later came a larger offer. A “very renowned” billionaire, whom neither CNBC nor Fortune names, offered $2 million at a $10 million valuation, which would have left Loosararian with more than 70% of the company. The condition, per both outlets, was that he move headquarters to San Francisco and build the robots in a lab.
He refused. His reasoning, in his own Fortune piece, was that robotics has to be built and tested close to the customers who use it. CNBC quotes him: “It came down to: What is the thing I believe in most?” Gecko stayed in Pittsburgh, where its headquarters remains. Fortune also records the skepticism of the period: venture investors called hardware robotics “a great way to fail,” and CNBC quotes the advice he heard: “Everyone said, ‘Don’t f---ing do it.’”
What the refusals bought
The numbers that follow are the ones reported by CNBC and Technical.ly:
- December 2023: a Series C of $173 million, valuing Gecko at $633 million (CNBC). Technical.ly describes it as a $73 million Series C in 2022 plus $100 million added the following year.
- June 12, 2025: a $125 million Series D led by new investor Cox Enterprises, with USIT, XN, Founders Fund and Y Combinator continuing, at a valuation of $1.25 billion. Total funding is about $347 million, per PitchBook as cited by Technical.ly.
- Customers: the U.S. Navy and Air Force, L3Harris, NAES (described by Technical.ly as the largest independent power operator in the U.S., with a reported $100 million contract) and, according to The National, Siemens Energy, Marathon Petroleum and Georgia-Pacific.
- Size: Loosararian wrote in February 2025 that Gecko had more than 300 employees across five major U.S. cities and the Middle East. Revenue has not been disclosed in any source we found.
The most recent reporting we found, from The National in August 2026, has him in Abu Dhabi territory: ADNOC and Gecko signed three agreements in 2025 on robotics and AI across ADNOC’s operations, including training Emiratis, and Loosararian says the UAE is among the top five robotics countries. He told the paper robotics growth will come from “less glamorous” work such as infrastructure inspection, and that “you have to go from theatre to impact.” No 2026 valuation was reported in that coverage.
What founders can take from it
The refusals were not heroics. Both turned down money that carried a condition about where and how the company would be run, and in each case he can name what he was protecting: a customer relationship in the first, and a field-built product in the second. That is the useful test. A small, certain exit and a large, conditional cheque are both ways of buying the founder’s judgment. Whether refusing them was right is only visible in hindsight, and the same decisions at a company that didn’t work would read as stubbornness. The record supports a narrower claim: Loosararian turned down $500,000 and a $10 million valuation, kept building with customers in the loop, and the next priced round was $633 million.
