Gecko Robotics CEO, Jake Loosararian, sits down with Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Brooke DiPalma to discuss the company's expansion and how its contracts with the US Navy and Nvidia ( NVDA ) factor in.
Geca Robotics big US Navy contract. Well, it just got bigger. more than more than quadrupling to $300 million as it works to support the military's branches readiness. Join me now is Geca Robotics CEO Jake Dean. Uh thanks so much for being with us. Walk us through what exactly this expansion will look like.
Well, what's so exciting about this is it builds off of the announcement of this contract, $71 million in April. Now it's $300 million and basically what it's all about.
Very short timeline.
Very short timeline just in the Navy too. They don't move too fast unless things really work.
Right.
right. So what this is all about is ensuring that we um arm the US Navy with the ability to be ready. I mean as you know, if something's not ready, it doesn't count. and that's very true for the military. And so our robots are sent out there to gather information and data sets that feed into our AI systems that help to ensure that we can get ships out of dry dock and back in the fight. So that's what we do.
And now I have to ask, when you think about data, of course privacy concerns around that. So how exactly do you ensure that this does stay private especially with the US Navy?
Yeah, you don't get to get to these size contracts unless you have a very robust uh security process and system and architecture. So, that's what we've done. Um it also is important too because, you know, recent partnerships with Nvidia that we announced last week, uh we're deploying out because we've been deploying for 13 years into these critical environments. Um we actually have begun to deploy agents, um using the open um shell with Nvidia. um it allows for us to actually use agents in these environments to gather a lot of information and data sets. Again, that feed into our AI models and that's what's helping to accelerate how quickly we can do repairs and maintenance and arm, you know, these poor engineers and these workers on the on the at the shipyards uh and at the um at the dry docks with the ability to know what to take action on and to get these ship back out to the seas.
I have to follow up on that because the partnership with Nvidia, I mean, this is a pretty sizable opportunity as well. So, what exactly will that partnership look like over the next few years? How do you plan to deploy that? And and also, what could this mean for the next chapter of the company?
Well, what's uh what's what we've tried to do is build from the front lines and so we we've been building our new uh uh robot that we built specifically for the Navy actually is called Komodo. And Komodo was built right alongside the people who are the experts about exactly how to get ships out of uh dry dock and and to repair it really quickly. And so when we build that way, we want to keep the humans um at the forefront, being in control. and that's what this partnership is about as well. We want to accelerate because we got to bring the best technology to bear for our war fighters and for the military. But we want to do so safely and keeping humans in control. So this sand box allows for us to deploy agents to move and gather information really, really quickly with the with the these wall climbing and and swimming and and flying robots um to be able to ensure that, you know, we can do that um using the best technology in the world and safely. So, all of this arms humans with the ability to take actions and provide insights and uh create repairs that they never had access to before. And by the way, China doesn't have any of this.
