Gather AI lands $40M to scale 'curious' warehouse drones that eliminate supply chain blind spots

Gather AI, maker of 'curious' warehouse drones, lands $40M led by Keith Block's 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 Arora put 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.

Gather AI Raises $40M Led by Smith Point Capital Management to Scale its Physical AI Platform for Global Logistics

Physical AI platform delivers ground truth in logistics, eliminating the 'reality gap' to protect enterprise margins and deliver ROI in under six months. PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--February 9, 2026-- Gather AI, the leader in Physical AI for logistics, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Smith Point Capital Management. The investment includes participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Tribeca Venture Partners, Bling Capital, Dundee Venture Capital, XRC Ventures, and new investor The Hillman Company. To date, the company has raised $74 million. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260209373452/en/ The investment follows a year of significant momentum, with Gather AI doubling its operational footprint and growing bookings 250%. The platform is now the operational standard for major logistics and manufacturing enterprises, including GEODIS, NFI Industries, Kwik Trip, Axon, dnata, Barrett Distribution, and Langham Logistics. This growth establishes Gather AI as one of the leading Physical AI companies globally, backed by top-tier investors including Keith Block, Founder and CEO of Smith Point Capital Management and former Salesforce co-CEO. Global logistics companies lose billions annually because warehouse activity rarely matches digital system records. This 'physical-digital divide' creates operational blind spots: missed shipments, excess inventory, labor inefficiencies, and margin erosion. Gather AI delivers continuous physical intelligence that eliminates these blind spots, enabling teams to identify bottlenecks before they cascade, optimize workflows in real-time, and operate with confidence rather than constant firefighting. "Gather AI is redefining how the physical world gets measured, understood, and operated," said Block."What Sankalp and his team have built isn't just a better way to count inventory; it's a foundational intelligence layer for the modern supply chain. We believe Gather AI will become the system of record for every warehouse, factory, and yard, and we're thrilled to help accelerate that future." While traditional AI processes text or images from the internet, Physical AI learns from the real world. Gather AI's models are trained on millions of proprietary warehouse images, allowing robots to see, count, and verify static and moving inventory in complex environments where standard sensors fail. Customers achieve 99.9% inventory accuracy, reduce manual counting effort by up to 80%, and improve productivity by 5x. Most customers realize ROI in under six months. This automated oversight transforms warehouses into intelligent nodes that optimize working capital and ensure end-to-end supply chain reliability. "For too long, supply chains have operated with a fundamental blind spot: they couldn't see what was actually happening on the floor," said Sankalp Arora, CEO and Co-Founder of Gather AI. "This funding allows us to expand from real-time visibility to full autonomous orchestration. Our customers aren't just finding problems faster. They're preventing them entirely. That shift from reactive to proactive is what transforms Physical AI from a nice-to-have into the operating system for modern logistics." The investment will accelerate expansion to hundreds of additional facilities globally and support the development of predictive capabilities for proactive inventory management. Gather AI is also scaling its engineering and customer success teams to support enterprise-wide deployments. Recognized by CB Insights as a leading AI startup and recipient of the Inc. Power Partner Award, Gather AI is expanding across North America, Europe, and Asia. The company will showcase its platform at Manifest and MODEX throughout 2026. About Gather AI Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Pittsburgh, Gather AI is the co-pilot for intralogistics teams and the world's first Physical Intelligence Platform - the system of record for operations across warehouses, plants, and yards. Using AI-powered vision on consumer-grade hardware such as drones and MHE, the platform digitizes pallets, tasks, and movements in real time with zero infrastructure changes required, delivering 99.9%+ accurate ground truth synced to WMS and ERP systems. Gather AI's leadership blends pioneering robotics research from Carnegie Mellon University with scaling experience from Amazon Robotics, applying advances in safe autonomy and 3D perception to solve intralogistics' toughest visibility and optimization challenges. The solution is deployed across logistics, manufacturing, food & beverage, retail, aerospace, and automotive at companies including GEODIS, NFI Industries, Axon, Kwik Trip, and dnata. Learn more at www.gather.ai, YouTube, and LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260209373452/en/