Gather AI, a startup offering 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 at Smith Point a year ago at a logistics conference, and “it took Keith and his team five minutes to get what we were doing,” co-founder and CEO Sankalp Arora told TechCrunch.

WHAT Assemble the AI what is done is amazing. The four founders met as PhD students at Carnegie Mellon University, where they built one of the first autonomous helicopters and tested it at the FBI training grounds in 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 watch operations on the floor and log what they find in warehouse management systems.

But the catch is, AI is not random about what it scans. It was “curious,” as Arora described it.

“My PhD work focused on how to build different types of flying robots,” he said. “So they’re interested in boxes and bar codes and workflows.”

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

They also work in environments that are not friendly to people, such as freezers and cold storage.

Because Gather’s core technology was built years before the age of large language models, it’s not the kind of AI an LLM uses.

“They are not end-to-end neural networks,” Arora explained. “These are classical Bayesian methods, combined with neural networks.”

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

Instead they are “curious,” as Arora says, to gather information (hence the startup’s name) and make a decision on the next course of action based on what they learn.

As old-school as it is, Gather AI sits on the edge of the next big thing in AI, sometimes called “embodied AI.” These are robots that interact in the real world, as opposed to LLMs that interact via computer chat or web apps.

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

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