The U.S. Navy has quadrupled its contract with Gecko Robotics to up to $300 million, six months after the initial $54 million deal was signed, in a bet that wall-climbing robots and AI can cut ship inspections from months to days.
Gecko Robotics announced the expansion Tuesday. The original five-year indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract covered 18 ships assigned to the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The new ceiling raises the value more than fivefold and adds scope beyond the original hull and deck work.
The stakes are plain. The Navy has set a goal of 80 percent fleet readiness by 2027, and the Government Accountability Office reported that readiness among amphibious warfare ships fell to 46 percent between 2011 and 2020. In August 2025 that rate reportedly dipped to 41 percent, producing a gap of more than five months in Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments that year.
What Gecko's robots actually do
Gecko uses drones, wall-climbing robots and fixed sensors to gather data on components, decks, welds and hulls. That information is fed into AI tools that identify current and potential structural issues a human inspector might miss.
The company's Komodo system scans the health of deck coatings without physically cutting into them. That lets planners map damaged areas before a ship enters dry dock, work that used to start only after the maintenance cycle began.
According to Gecko, the technology can save up to $8 million in repair costs per ship and identify structural issues up to 50 times faster than traditional methods. The company says inspections that once took months now take days.
The Komodo machine is built to move along vertical surfaces and overhead decks, capturing high-resolution data on coating thickness, corrosion and substrate condition. It does not replace the sailor with a paint scraper; it changes what gets measured and when. Instead of cutting exploratory holes to check whether corrosion has spread beneath a coating, the robot reads the condition through the surface.
That distinction matters for scheduling. A shipyard that knows the extent of damage before the vessel arrives can order materials, book welders and sequence work before the dry dock clock starts. Under the old process, much of that planning happened reactively, after inspectors found problems the hard way.
The savings figure is the company's own estimate, not an audited government number. Still, the Navy's willingness to expand the contract this quickly suggests the early work on Pacific Fleet ships produced results leadership found credible. A $54 million pilot that fails to show value does not usually quadruple in six months.
A readiness problem that predates robots
The Navy's maintenance backlog is not new. Ships spend longer in dry dock than planned, and parts shortages compound delays. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, who adopted the 80 percent readiness goal from his predecessor Adm. Lisa Franchetti, has tied the target to shorter maintenance cycles, more spare parts, better training pipelines and targeted upgrades across the fleet.
Robots do not fix parts shortages. They compress the inspection phase, which is one input into the maintenance timeline. Whether that translates into more ships at sea depends on how fast yards can act on the data Gecko's systems produce.
The GAO report covering 2011 to 2020 found readiness among amphibious warfare ships fell to 46 percent, hindering Marine Corps deployment and training plans. In August 2025 that rate reportedly dipped to 41 percent, producing a gap of more than five months in Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments that year and straining resources amid the administration's push to counter the illicit drug trade in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Caudle, writing for Military Times in December, laid out the major tenets for reaching the 80 percent milestone. Shorter maintenance cycles, increased spare-parts availability, improved training pipelines and targeted upgrades across the fleet were his stated requirements. Gecko's contribution addresses the first of those four.
Why the contract expanded so fast
Six months from a $54 million pilot to a $300 million ceiling is a short runway. Gecko founder and CEO Jake Loosararian wrote on LinkedIn that the expansion marked a major moment for the company. The Navy, for its part, has been under pressure to show progress on readiness ahead of the 2027 deadline.
The deal is structured as an IDIQ, so the $300 million is a ceiling rather than a guaranteed spend. The Navy can order work as needed across the fleet, which keeps the program flexible but also means the final bill depends on how many ships get the treatment.
For robotics suppliers, the signal is clear: the military is willing to pay for automation that shortens maintenance cycles, not just for hardware that looks impressive in a demo. That is a narrower and more durable market than consumer delivery drones.
Gecko was founded in 2016 and has raised venture funding to build robots for industrial inspection. Its systems have been used on bridges, power plants and oil refineries in addition to ships. The Navy deal is the largest public contract the company has announced, and it validates a business model built on recurring inspection data rather than one-time hardware sales. The revenue model resembles a software subscription more than a traditional defense procurement.
The contract also signals how the Pentagon is changing its buying habits. Instead of funding a single bespoke system, the IDIQ structure lets the Navy scale usage as results accumulate. That is closer to how commercial software is bought than how warships are traditionally maintained. If Gecko delivers, expect similar inspection contracts for aircraft, submarines and shore facilities.
What comes next
Gecko says its systems are already deployed on Navy ships and that the expanded contract will extend coverage. The Navy has not disclosed how many additional vessels will be inspected under the new ceiling or whether the work will move beyond the Pacific Fleet.
The 80 percent readiness target is 14 months away. Inspections that take days instead of months help, but only if shipyards can schedule repairs around the findings. The harder problem is still parts, labor and dock capacity.
For more context on the Navy's maintenance push, see Navy Times coverage. Related reporting on defense automation is available in our robotics and drones category.