In 2012, Jake Loosararian and a few other Grove City College engineering students set out to solve a problem that a local power plant operator had brought to them: how do you get an accurate and reliable reading on the corrosion of boilers, tanks, and other pieces of industrial equipment? The traditional method of testing requires manual labor, scaffolding, and does not capture a high amount of data points. The team figured out that they could make a robot climb up the walls of these pieces of equipment to gather thousands of data points. This idea eventually sprouted into the start-up company Gecko Robotics. Jake Loosararian is the founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics, and found a way to create a viable business out of a school project.

This technology is revolutionary in an industry that has been dormant for decades. Loosararian found a way to utilize robots that not only got the job done quicker, but captured over 1000x more data points. He did not stop there, and also built a user-friendly interface that allows plant operators to understand their assets inside and out, saving them millions of dollars by avoiding outages and decreasing downtime.

Loosararian succeeds as an entrepreneur due to his ability to understand what the customer really wants. He lives by the business philosophy that to prosper, you need to make something people want, and continues to deliver results that exceed his clients expectations in an industry that was once dormant and lacking innovation.