Gather AI, maker of ‘weird’ warehouse drones, secures $40M led by Keith Block

Gather AI, a startup providing an AI platform for warehouse cameras and drones, has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by SmithPoint Capital. This is a venture capital firm founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block.

The Gather team first met SmithPoint a year ago at a logistics conference, and “it took Keith and his team five minutes to get what we’re doing,” says Sankalp Arora, co-founder and CEO of TechCrunch.

What AI collection What he does is extraordinary. The four founders met while they were doctoral students at Carnegie Mellon University, where they built one of the first autonomous helicopters and tested it at the FBI training grounds at Quantico. (Block is a trustee of CMU.)

In 2017, the founders took what they learned about teaching helicopters to fly and land safely and launched Gather AI. Using off-the-shelf cameras placed on strategic moving equipment such as forklifts, as well as off-the-shelf drones flying around the warehouse, the cameras monitor operations on the ground and record what they find in warehouse management systems.

But the problem is that the AI ​​does not act randomly in what it scans. It’s “curious,” as Arora described it.

“My PhD focused on how to make different types of flying robots curious,” he said. “So they’re interested in the boxes and the barcodes and the workflow.”

In addition to barcodes, they look for lot codes, texts, expiration dates, case counts, damages, occupancy, and other items. The idea is that they will detect and predict problems such as low inventory, misplaced inventory, and workflows that may cause safety issues.

They also work in environments that are unfriendly to people, such as freezers and cold stores.

Because Gather’s underlying technology was created years before the era of large language models, this is not the type of AI that an LLM uses.

“They are not comprehensive neural networks,” Arora explains. “It’s classic Bayesian techniques, combined with neural networks.”

Bayesian AI vision techniques use probability-based methods to teach computers how to interpret visual data. These systems allow technology to learn using data and prior knowledge to make decisions, which means they don’t have the hallucination problems that MBA students have.

Instead, they’re “curious,” Arora says, to gather information (hence the startup’s name) and decide on their next action based on what they’ve learned.

Although it sounds old school, Gather AI is on the verge of the next big thing in AI, It is sometimes called “embodied AI.” These are bots that interact with the real world, as opposed to LLM interacting via chat on a computer or web application.

To that end, in December, the startup won an award 2025 Nebius Robotics Vision AI and Streaming Video Analytics Award. (Nebius is a Dutch company that provides AI infrastructure.)

Gather currently employs about 60 people, and clients include Kwik Trip, Axon, GEODIS and NFI Industries, Arora said. Thanks to this new funding, the startup has now raised a total of $74 million. Other investors include Bain Capital Ventures, XRC Ventures and Hillman Investments.