Why I turned down a windfall to grow my company [Video]

Jake Loosararian had less than $135 in his bank account.

It was 2015, and he’d spent nearly three years struggling to bootstrap Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based startup he’d launched right out of college with wall-climbing robots that scanned infrastructure like power plants and nuclear missile silos for structural issues. So when a customer offered him $500,000 to buy the company, seemingly out of nowhere, the “transformative” offer stopped him dead in his tracks, he says.

“It was earth-shattering money for me,” says Loosararian. Running Gecko had led him to “some deep, dark places,” both literally and figuratively, he notes — from emptying his bank account and sleeping on friends’ floors to soldering circuit boards in hot, dusty, eerie power plant boiler rooms. He’d thought, repeatedly, about walking away.

He rejected the customer’s offer anyway.

Today, Gecko is valued at $633 million, as of a fundraising round last year. Its clients include the U.S. Navy and Air Force, and it ranked 42nd on the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 Listin …