TechCrunch has profiled geCKo Materials, a startup founded by Capella Kerst, reporting on the company's trajectory from the Startup Battlefield competition stage to developing materials technology now connected to operations aboard the International Space Station. The piece, part of TechCrunch's Build Mode series, features a conversation with Kerst about how the company reached that milestone.
The name geCKo Materials is not accidental. The gecko has long been a fixation of materials scientists and engineers for one simple reason: its feet work in ways that conventional adhesives do not. A gecko clings to smooth vertical surfaces and detaches without leaving residue, without losing effectiveness over repeated use, and without relying on chemical bonding. The mechanism is van der Waals forces — weak intermolecular attractions that, when multiplied across millions of microscopic hair-like structures called setae on the gecko's toe pads, produce reliable and reversible adhesion. Researchers have been trying to replicate this for decades, and the race to do so commercially has accelerated as industries from robotics to aerospace have identified dry, reusable, residue-free adhesion as a genuine unsolved problem.
This is not a niche curiosity. Conventional adhesives are fundamentally limited in environments where temperature swings are extreme, where surfaces must be bonded and unbonded repeatedly, or where chemical contamination is unacceptable. The International Space Station represents perhaps the most demanding version of all three constraints simultaneously. The thermal cycling in low Earth orbit is severe, the vacuum environment changes how materials behave, and contamination of sensitive instruments or surfaces can have serious downstream consequences. If a gecko-inspired adhesive can perform reliably in that context, it represents a significant proof of concept that extends well beyond space applications.
Startup Battlefield, the competition TechCrunch runs at its Disrupt conference, has historically served as a signal-amplifying event rather than a funding mechanism in itself. Companies that compete tend to be at early but genuine stages of technical development, and the platform offers visibility to investors and potential partners at a moment when those relationships can shape a company's trajectory. That geCKo Materials moved from that stage to work connected to the ISS suggests the company has navigated the difficult middle passage that kills most deep-tech startups — the period between a compelling laboratory demonstration and a deployment in a real-world, high-stakes environment.
Deep-tech hardware companies face a specific and brutal funding dynamic. The timelines are long, the capital requirements are high, and the path from bench science to commercial product rarely moves in a straight line. Gecko-adhesion research has been ongoing in academia for long enough that multiple universities hold relevant intellectual property, which means any commercial entrant has to negotiate a landscape of prior art while also solving the engineering problems that academic research tends to leave unresolved. Getting hardware to the ISS, whether through a NASA partnership, a commercial payload arrangement, or some other mechanism, typically requires clearing regulatory, safety, and technical bars that would eliminate most early-stage companies. The fact that geCKo Materials appears to have cleared those bars is the detail that merits attention.
The likely consequences of this development operate at a few levels. For the company itself, ISS-connected work functions as a form of credibility that is difficult to manufacture and easy for potential customers and investors to understand. Industries including medical devices, advanced manufacturing, electronics assembly, and soft robotics all have applications where reversible dry adhesion would represent a meaningful improvement over current solutions. A demonstrated performance record in orbit does not automatically translate to commercial traction in those markets, but it substantially lowers the persuasion burden when approaching potential partners. For the broader field, a commercially viable gecko-adhesive product reaching operational deployment would likely accelerate investment interest in related biomimetic materials companies, many of which are working on analogous problems in adhesion, surface texture engineering, and reversible bonding.
For competitors and researchers watching this space, the more pressing question is what specific performance characteristics geCKo Materials has achieved and under what conditions. The history of gecko-adhesive research includes a long list of materials that worked brilliantly under narrow laboratory conditions and degraded badly when exposed to dust, humidity, or repeated cycling. Whether the company has solved the durability and scalability problems that have frustrated earlier efforts is the technical question that will ultimately determine how significant this milestone is.
What to watch for next is straightforward. Any announcement of commercial licensing agreements or partnerships with manufacturers in robotics, medical, or electronics sectors would suggest the ISS work has translated into a viable route to revenue. Equally telling would be follow-on funding at a scale consistent with production rather than continued research and development. And if other space agencies or commercial launch providers begin incorporating geCKo Materials technology into their own programs, that would confirm that the ISS deployment was a genuine proof of concept rather than a one-time demonstration in a controlled and cooperative environment.
