Startups

Gather AI secures new cash to scan inventory in warehouses using drones

Comment

Image Credits: Getty Images

Gather AI, a startup using drones to inventory items in warehouses, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Tribeca Venture Partners with participation from Xplorer Capital, Dundee Venture Capital, Expa, Bling Capital, XRC Labs and 99 Tartans. The proceeds bring the company’s total raised to $17 million, which CEO Sankalp Arora says is being put toward expanding Gather’s deployment capacity and go-to-market plans as well as hiring new machine learning engineers.

Arora co-founded Gather AI in 2019 with Daniel Maturana and Geetesh Dubey, graduate students at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. The trio had the idea to use drones to gather data — specifically data in warehouses, such as the number of items on a shelf and the locations of particular pallets. Over the course of several years, they designed a prototype of an inventory monitoring system that used off-the-shelf autonomous drones, which became Gather’s core product.

“The space we are operating in is about providing automation with zero capital expenditure and enabling our customers to work at the efficiency of Amazon without needing the hundreds of millions of dollars they pour into their warehouses,” Arora told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Off-the-shelf hardware is more reliable and proven than custom-engineered hardware and our software is drone-agnostic so we can source from a large supply chain with no factory to manage.”

Gather isn’t the first to market with a drone-based inventory monitoring system. Boston-based Corvus Robotics, too, leverages indoor drones to help warehouses keep track of stock. So does Pensa Systems, Vimaan, Intelligent Flying Machines, Vtrus and Verity.

But Arora makes the case that Gather’s approach is more fungible — and less costly — than that of its rivals because it relies on consumer as opposed to custom-built drones. While consumer-grade drones usually lack high-quality sensors, they’re more attainable and scalable than their commercial counterparts, according to Arora, and still able to perform tasks like detecting damaged inventory (with thermal scanning) and counting pallet cases. They’re also more replaceable — Gather swaps drones out for free in the event one malfunctions.

“A core innovation of our company is that we can achieve sophisticated state estimation on commodity hardware, and we can fly autonomously without GPS on drones that you can walk into a Best Buy and buy tomorrow if you wanted,” Arora said. “Consumer drones use consumer hardware, and unlike the high-end sensors in expensive robots you’re stuck using monocular vision on rolling shutter cameras that have a ‘Jell-O’ effect, and asynchronous sensor data. This was a huge challenge to solve, but now that we have overcome it our autonomy is extensible to non-drone commodity applications in the future.”

Gather AI
Gather’s drones scan the sides of boxes in warehouses, updating inventory as they fly. Image Credits: Gather AI

Arora says Gather also benefits from “network effects” in the sense that each new pallet its drones scan increases the size of the data set the company uses to train its inventory-classifying systems. This in turn improves the overall accuracy of the platform’s image processing.

“[These network effects are] especially important for irregularities that are hard to model with synthetic data, like occluded barcodes, damaged boxes and irregular case stacking,” Arora says.

Gather’s other innovation lies in the platform’s autonomy software, which doesn’t require customers to make changes to their warehouse layouts or infrastructure. Gather’s drones work in dark warehouses with motion sensor lights — the drones are equipped with night vision — and run on an iPad attached to the drone controller that works absent Wi-Fi. Setup usually takes a matter of weeks and costs clients “little to nothing,” Arora says.

Arora claims that Gather drones are now deployed in 14 warehouses and scanning “thousands” of pallets every week for customers in industries such as air cargo, third-party logistics, retail distribution and food and beverage. Arora didn’t reveal concrete revenue figures, but said that he anticipates Gather will be in 30 warehouses total within the next six months.

“Increased demand, heightened customer expectations, and the pressure for speed and the constraints of the supply chain was a perfect storm. The storm made everyone realize that the supply chain is a delicate system and any one hiccup really has a ripple effect,” Arora said. “For a CEO, [Gather’s platform] shows what’s sitting in their warehouses, which is critical to understanding how their facilities are being managed and performing. For the CFO, because they’re able to get a real-time look at what inventory they have, they can more accurately manage their cost and profit margins, and better project future financial outlooks. [And] for the VPs of the supply chain, they can stay ahead of what’s coming into their warehouses and fulfill them on time.”

Pittsburgh-based Gather, which currently employs 29 people, aims to hire 35 to 40 by the end of the year. That might sound ambitious, but if Gather’s funding is anything to go by, VCs still have an appetite for drone companies. According to a February report by partners at Phystech Ventures, VCs have poured roughly $5 billion into 129 drone startups over the last two years.

“Our use of commodity drones gives us a path to 80%+ unit gross margin like a mainstream business-to-business enterprise software-as-a-service company,” Arora added. “Our annual recurring grew 30% month-over-month for the first half of this year. This was a key signal that showed us that now was the time to raise more capital, despite the dire fundraising market conditions.”

More TechCrunch

Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has raised $6 billion in a new funding round, it said today, in one of the largest deals in the red-hot nascent space, as he…

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6B from Valor, a16z, and Sequoia

Indian startup Zypp Electric plans to use fresh investment from Japanese oil and energy conglomerate ENEOS to take its EV rental service into Southeast Asia early next year, TechCrunch has…

Indian EV startup Zypp Electric secures backing to fund expansion to Southeast Asia

Last month, one of the Bay Area’s better-known early-stage venture capital firms, Uncork Capital, marked its 20th anniversary with a party in a renovated church in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood,…

A venture capital firm looks back on changing norms, from board seats to backing rival startups

The families of victims of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas are suing Activision and Meta, as well as gun manufacturer Daniel Defense. The families bringing the…

Families of Uvalde shooting victims sue Activision and Meta

Like most Silicon Valley VCs, what Garry Tan sees is opportunities for new, huge, lucrative businesses.

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan supports some AI regulation but warns against AI monopolies

Everything in society can feel geared toward optimization – whether that’s standardized testing or artificial intelligence algorithms. We’re taught to know what outcome you want to achieve, and find the…

How Maven’s AI-run ‘serendipity network’ can make social media interesting again

Miriam Vogel, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is the CEO of the nonprofit responsible AI advocacy organization EqualAI.

Women in AI: Miriam Vogel stresses the need for responsible AI

Google has been taking heat for some of the inaccurate, funny, and downright weird answers that it’s been providing via AI Overviews in search. AI Overviews are the AI-generated search…

What are Google’s AI Overviews good for?

When it comes to the world of venture-backed startups, some issues are universal, and some are very dependent on where the startups and its backers are located. It’s something we…

The ups and downs of investing in Europe, with VCs Saul Klein and Raluca Ragab

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. OpenAI announced this week that…

Scarlett Johansson brought receipts to the OpenAI controversy

Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries like agriculture, and they’re also important to help prevent and mitigate harm from inclement weather events or natural disasters. But getting forecasts right…

Deal Dive: Can blockchain make weather forecasts better? WeatherXM thinks so

pcTattletale’s website was briefly defaced and contained links containing files from the spyware maker’s servers, before going offline.

Spyware app pcTattletale was hacked and its website defaced

Featured Article

Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Synapse’s bankruptcy shows just how treacherous things are for the often-interdependent fintech world when one key player hits trouble. 

2 days ago
Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Sarah Myers West, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is managing director at the AI Now institute.

Women in AI: Sarah Myers West says we should ask, ‘Why build AI at all?’

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI and publishers are partners of convenience

Evan, a high school sophomore from Houston, was stuck on a calculus problem. He pulled up Answer AI on his iPhone, snapped a photo of the problem from his Advanced…

AI tutors are quietly changing how kids in the US study, and the leading apps are from China

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Well,…

Startups Weekly: Drama at Techstars. Drama in AI. Drama everywhere.

Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we approach the halfway point of the year. 2024 delivered four venture-backed tech…

From Plaid to Figma, here are the startups that are likely — or definitely — not having IPOs this year

Federal safety regulators have discovered nine more incidents that raise questions about the safety of Waymo’s self-driving vehicles operating in Phoenix and San Francisco.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration…

Feds add nine more incidents to Waymo robotaxi investigation

Terra One’s pitch deck has a few wins, but also a few misses. Here’s how to fix that.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Terra One’s $7.5M Seed deck

Chinasa T. Okolo researches AI policy and governance in the Global South.

Women in AI: Chinasa T. Okolo researches AI’s impact on the Global South

TechCrunch Disrupt takes place on October 28–30 in San Francisco. While the event is a few months away, the deadline to secure your early-bird tickets and save up to $800…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird tickets fly away next Friday

Another week, and another round of crazy cash injections and valuations emerged from the AI realm. DeepL, an AI language translation startup, raised $300 million on a $2 billion valuation;…

Big tech companies are plowing money into AI startups, which could help them dodge antitrust concerns

If raised, this new fund, the firm’s third, would be its largest to date.

Harlem Capital is raising a $150 million fund

About half a million patients have been notified so far, but the number of affected individuals is likely far higher.

US pharma giant Cencora says Americans’ health information stolen in data breach

Attention, tech enthusiasts and startup supporters! The final countdown is here: Today is the last day to cast your vote for the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice program. Voting closes…

Last day to vote for TC Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice program

Featured Article

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker on the Telegram security clash and the ‘edge lords’ at OpenAI 

Among other things, Whittaker is concerned about the concentration of power in the five main social media platforms.

3 days ago
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker on the Telegram security clash and the ‘edge lords’ at OpenAI 

Lucid Motors is laying off about 400 employees, or roughly 6% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring ahead of the launch of its first electric SUV later this…

Lucid Motors slashes 400 jobs ahead of crucial SUV launch

Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup. The Android-maker will also provide Flipkart with cloud offerings as…

Google invests $350 million in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart

A Jio Financial unit plans to purchase customer premises equipment and telecom gear worth $4.32 billion from Reliance Retail.

Jio Financial unit to buy $4.32B of telecom gear from Reliance Retail