Palantir Co-Founder Joins Foundry For Builders $73 Million Series C Round
Foundry for Builders is Palantir's initiative to allow high growth, high potential startups to use this software in order to build their businesses even while at a relatively small size.
The goal is to show their software can help startups grow and scale & this page will be updated with the latest news regarding those companies.
Gecko Robotics is one of those companies. They recently announced a $73M Series C financing round. Their last round before this brought in $40M. Joe Lonsdale, Palantir Co-Founder, participated in the round.
Jake Loosararian is the CEO.
As first quoted by The Robot Report,
“Jake is incredibly passionate about industrial infrastructure – which is a weird thing to be passionate about – but it’s been incredible seeing that dedication and drive translate into Gecko’s growth. Rather than eliminating workers, Gecko’s technology minimizes danger by removing them from the most precarious maintenance tasks,” Trae Stephens, partner at Founders Fund, said.
XN led the most recent funding round. Founders Fund, XYZ, Drive Capital, Snowpoint Ventures, Joe Lonsdale, Mark Cuban, Gokul Rajaram and more participated in the round.
“Gecko’s unique combination of robotics and software radically improves the ability to inspect, protect, and efficiently maintain critical infrastructure,” Tim Brown, partner at XN, said. “We are excited to partner with Jake and Troy as they extend Gecko’s powerful technology into new geographies and industries, helping customers collect and make sense of physical data to optimize the safety and performance of their assets.”
What This Means for Palantir
The Foundry for Builders companies, much like the SPACs, will either be a hit or miss. These companies will either go onto to become massive and deliver a substantial return for Palantir (financially and by letting their respective industries see that it was Palantir's software that paved the way for the company to be successful) or they will be a waste of capital Palantir invested in that could have been allocated elsewhere.
Financing rounds like these are bullish for Palantir and their investment thesis. When companies raise subsequent rounds of financing, it means that they are making real progress.
They've convinced institutional investors to allocate their capital in a company that's quickly growing and a result can guarantee a stronger probability of a substantial return over investing in the public markets or other startups.
Gecko's Mission is below:
"Gecko Robotics offers turnkey NDT inspection services and inspection data management tools to predict asset failure. There is nothing more important than pin-pointing areas of concern and addressing them predictively before failure. We’ve pioneered a suite of best-in-class ultrasonic inspections techniques - using our combination of humans, robots and software - that perform QUICKER, are more COMPLETE, are more ACCURATE, and inherently SAFER than traditional methods. We believe our technologies give the inspector an exoskeleton of advanced tools to tackle any inspection job."
Gecko Robotics is a very complex company trying to handle very complex situations with robotic technology and inspections.
While their goals are big, raising financing rounds proves that they are making the progress needed to actually justify raising more capital. The more the company grows and becomes successful, the better it is for Palantir's software being the foundation for these high-growth startups.
Thanks for reading the article. If you'd like to get in contact, please @ me on twitter here or email me at amit@dailypalantir.com.
