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.
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