Gather AI, a startup providing an AI platform for warehouse cameras and drones, has raised a forty million dollar Series B funding round. The investment was led by Smith Point Capital, the venture capital firm founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block. The Gather team first met Smith Point a year ago at a logistics conference. Co-founder and CEO Sankalp Arora noted that it took Keith Block and his team just five minutes to understand their vision.
The company’s origin 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. Keith Block is a trustee for the university. In 2017, the founders applied what they learned about teaching helicopters to fly and land safely to launch Gather AI.
The platform uses off-the-shelf cameras placed on strategic equipment like forklifts, along with off-the-shelf drones that fly around the warehouse. These cameras monitor on-the-floor operations and log their findings directly into warehouse management systems. The AI is not random in what it scans. Instead, it is designed to be curious, actively seeking out boxes, barcodes, and workflows.
Beyond barcodes, the system looks for lot codes, text, expiration dates, case counts, damages, occupancy, and other items. The goal is to discover and predict issues such as low inventory, misplaced stock, and workflows that could pose safety risks. The technology also operates effectively in environments unfriendly to people, like freezers and cold storage.
Gather’s underlying technology was built years before the rise of large language models. It does not use the same approach as an LLM. The systems are not end-to-end neural networks. They are classical Bayesian techniques combined with neural networks. These probability-based methods teach computers to interpret visual data by using data and prior knowledge to make decisions, avoiding the hallucination problems associated with LLMs. The systems get curious to gather information and decide on the next action based on what they have learned.
This places Gather AI 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 a chat interface. In December, the startup won the 2025 Nebius Robotics award for Vision AI and Streaming Video Analytics. Nebius is a Netherlands-based company that provides AI infrastructure.
Gather AI currently employs about sixty people. Its customers include Kwik Trip, Axon, GEODIS, and NFI Industries. With this latest funding, the startup has now raised a total of seventy-four million dollars. Other investors in the company include Bain Capital Ventures, XRC Ventures, and Hillman Investments.