Gather AI, a startup that provides an AI platform for warehouse cameras and drones, has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Smith Point Capital. It’s a VC firm founded by Keith Block, former co-CEO of Salesforce.
The Gather team first met Smith Point at a logistics conference a year ago, and “Keith and his team took five minutes to understand what we were doing,” co-founder and CEO Sankalp Arora told TechCrunch.
What Gather AI is doing is unusual. The three founders met as doctoral students at Carnegie Mellon University, where they built one of the first autonomous helicopters and tested it at the FBI training range in Quantico. (Brock is a trustee of CMU.)
In 2017, the founders launched Gather AI, taking what they learned about teaching helicopters to fly and land safely. Using off-the-shelf cameras installed on strategic mobile equipment such as forklifts, and off-the-shelf drones that fly within the warehouse, the cameras monitor work on site and record their findings into the warehouse management system.
However, the problem is that the AI is not random about what it scans. As Arora puts it, it means being “curious.”
“My doctoral research focused on how to interest different types of flying robots,” he said. “So they’re interested in boxes and barcodes and workflows.”
In addition to barcodes, we also search lot codes, text, expiration dates, case counts, damage, occupancy, and other items. The idea is to discover and predict problems such as stock shortages, misplaced inventory, and workflows that can pose safety hazards.
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It can also be used in environments that are not friendly to people, such as freezers and cold storage warehouses.
The technology underlying Gather was built years before the era of large-scale language models, so this is not the type of AI that LLMs use.
“They are not end-to-end neural networks,” Arora explains. “These combine classical Bayesian techniques with neural networks.”
AI Vision Bayesian methods use probability-based techniques to teach computers how to interpret visual data. These systems allow technology to use data and prior knowledge to make decisions, without suffering from the LLM illusion problem.
Instead, they “be curious,” as Arora puts it, gathering information (hence the startup’s name) and deciding their next move based on what they learn.
It may sound old-fashioned, but Gather AI is on the cusp of the next big thing in AI, also known as “embodied AI.” These are robots that interact with the real world, as opposed to LLMs, which interact via computer chat or web apps.
To this end, the startup won the 2025 Nebius Robotics Award in December for Vision AI and streaming video analytics. (Nebius is a Dutch company that provides AI infrastructure.)
Arora said Gather currently has about 60 employees and customers include Kwik Trip, Axon, GEODIS and NFI Industries. With this new funding, the startup has raised a total of $74 million. Other investors include Bain Capital Ventures, XRC Ventures, and Hillman Investments.
