The 2024 runner-up in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, geCKo Materials, returned to the stage at this year’s show to debut new products as it pushes deeper into commercializing its tech.
Founder Dr. Capella Kerst revealed four new uses of geCKo’s super-strong dry adhesive: a semiconductor wafer handling tool, a robotic gripper for smooth surfaces (like solar panels or glass), a curved robotic “end effector” for more irregular shapes, and an all-purpose gripper for robotic arms.
The geCKo tech is inspired by the way real-life lizards use their feet to grip surfaces. Kerst positions it like a new form of Velcro, but one that leaves no residue, can quickly attach and detach, and requires no electrical charge or suction. A one-inch tile of the material can hold 16 pounds, and the geCKo dry adhesive can attach as many as 120,000 times — and can stay attached for seconds, minutes, or years.
The ability to quickly adapt the dry adhesive to existing manufacturing, picking, and other robotic applications has proven popular. Kerst’s company won over Ford, NASA, and Pacific Gas & Electric as customers before she even competed on last year’s Battlefield stage.
“Has this year flown by as quickly for anybody else as it has for us?” Kerst said on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage on Wednesday. The geCKo CEO said her company has tripled the size of her team since last year’s show and completed an $8 million fundraise. And geCKo’s dry adhesive was used on six space missions in the last year — a testament to the material’s ability to work in multiple environments, including a vacuum, according to Kerst.
Onstage Wednesday, Kerst showed off a Fanuc robotic arm using six geCKo tiles to quickly grab and move objects around, before showing videos of the other commercialized applications.
In one of those videos, Kerst showed geCKo’s material being used to safely move semiconductor wafers faster than current suction or vacuum tech allows.
“Our customers at TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and Kawasaki said we have a goal to [move the wafers] at 2Gs of acceleration,” she said. “We decided to blow them out of the water and do 5.4Gs of acceleration repeatedly, reliably, using geCKo materials.”