Is there such a thing as too speedy delivery?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

It's Friday, time for Marketplace Techbytes, where we look at a few of the big stories happening in tech.

This week, Amazon speeds up delivery even more.

Plus, will BuzzFeed stay in business?

But first, Gecko, a robotic startup, landed a $71 million contract with the U.S. Navy.

The 13-year-old Pittsburgh-based company says it'll be using drones and wall-climbing robots to help find defects on ships.

Then it will use AI to model current and future structural issues.

I talked about this with Anita Ramaswami at the information.

The pitch is that this will allow soldiers to actually focus on fighting, whereas a lot of the tech and the maintenance

and some of the more rote day-to-day tasks will be handled by Gecko.

Yeah, you know, the Navy set a goal back in October 24 to have 80% of its ships and aircraft

ready to go on short notice by 2027, which is next year. Right now, according to reporting

from Defense 1, less than half of all

the Navy's ships completed repairs on time last year. What's your sense of how important it is to

speed up that process? I mean, it's certainly been a strategic priority when it comes to this

presidential administration. And, you know, we've seen the government, the U.S.

government partner a lot more closely with different startups. And so they've been replacing a lot of the legacy vendors, the contractors like the Raytheons of the world, the bohings of the world,

with some of these tech startups. I thought it was interesting timing because we saw, you know,

earlier just a couple of days ago, the U.S. Army announced this

contract with Anderil, which is another hot defense tech startup worth up to $20 million.

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