Pre-IPO Gecko Robotics Wins Its Biggest-Ever Navy Contract
It's a rare moment when a company can brag it just won its biggest contract ever -- but it happens more often than you might think. Much more rarely do you find a company winning a single contract worth more than all the revenue it's ever collected in its lifetime.
Last week, Gecko Robotics may have hit that mark.
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Get to know Gecko
Gecko Robotics builds robots . Hence the name. It builds all kinds of robots -- crawling, swimming, flying -- but is best known for robots that can climb surfaces vertically (like a gecko lizard), inspecting for structural defects and collecting data so those defects can be repaired before a structure fails.
Gecko is a privately owned company . As a result, it's not easy for investors to obtain up-to-date financial information about the company. Market intelligence platform GetLatka.com, however, reports that from $0 in revenue at its founding 10 years ago, Gecko grew to $34.5 million in total revenue by June 2024, then to $60 million by the end of 2024.
That's the best revenue data we have on Gecko. But based on that, the company seems to have just won more potential revenue from a single contract than all the revenue it's collected since its founding: $71 million.
A $71 million Navy contract
Last week, the U.S. Navy awarded Gecko a five-year, $71 million contract to use its robots to inspect 18 Navy warships for flaws in components, hulls, decks, and welds "that cannot be seen by the human eye." Then, crunching the data through its Cantilever software and applying artificial intelligence, Gecko will create a digital record of each naval asset inspected for future reference.
In an X post describing the contract, Gecko pointed out that its robots can conduct inspections "up to 50x faster and more accurately than manual methods."
So, as valuable as the contract may be to Gecko, it might also save the Navy some money. If this proves true, it's not unreasonable to expect that the Navy might expand the contract to the rest of its ships, which number more than 10 times the vessels covered in the instant contract.
If this happens, the best place to check for evidence of it will be on the Department of War's daily digest of contract announcements. To date, Gecko hasn't been named as winning any awards there, not even the $71 million one.
Will Gecko IPO?
Aside from these occasional mentions in the press, on X, and on the government's contracts pages, investors shouldn't expect to get much more data on Gecko unless and until the company begins preparing for an initial public offering (IPO). If Gecko is going to IPO, though, it shouldn't be much longer. As the company noted last June, it has already reached $1.25 billion in private-market value following its Series D funding round.
And yes, you read that right: This means Gecko is actually a unicorn.
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Pre-IPO Gecko Robotics Wins Its Biggest-Ever Navy Contract was originally published by The Motley Fool
