Gather AI, maker of curious warehouse drones, lands $40M led by Keith Blocks firm  | TechCrunch

Gather AI, a startup that offers an AI platform for warehouse cameras and drones, has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Smith Point Capital. That’s the VC firm founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block.

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

What Gather AI is doing is unusual. The four founders met as PhD students at Carnegie Mellon University, where they built one of the first autonomous helicopters and tested it on the FBI training grounds in Quantico. (Block is a trustee for 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 like forklifts, as well as off-the-shelf drones flying around the warehouse, the cameras watch on-the-floor operations and log what they find into the warehouse management systems.

But the catch is, the AI isn’t being random about what it scans. It is being “curious,” as Arora described it.

“My PhD work focused on how to make different kinds of flying robots curious,” he said. “So they’re curious about boxes and bar codes and workflows.”

In addition to barcodes, they look for lot codes, text, expiration dates, case counts, damages, occupancy, and other items. The idea is that they will discover and predict issues like low inventory, misplaced stock, and workflows that may cause safety issues.

They also work in environments unfriendly to people, like freezers and cold storage.

Because Gather’s underlying tech was built years before the age of large language models, this is not the kind of AI that an LLM uses.

“They’re not end-to-end neural networks,” Arora explains. “They are classical Bayesian techniques, combined with neural networks.”

AI vision Bayesian techniques use probability-base methods to teach computers how to interpret visual data. These systems allow the technology to learn by using data and prior knowledge to make decisions — meaning they don’t suffer the hallucination problems of LLMs.

Instead they “get curious,” as Aroraput it, to gather information (hence the startup’s name) and make a decision on the next action based on what they’ve learned.

As old-school as that sounds, Gather AI is sitting at the edge of the next big thing in AI, sometimes called “embodied AI.” These are robots that interact with the real world, as opposed to an LLM interacting via computer chat or web app.

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

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