Fueling Gather AI’s Growth with our $10M Series A financing

By Sankalp Arora and Charlie Reverte

We are thrilled to announce our $10M Series A financing, led by Tribeca Venture Partners. This new funding will help us scale our drone-powered real-time inventory monitoring platform and meet the overwhelming demand we see in the market. Our customers are working hard to upgrade their operations, to keep up with the needs of omni-channel logistics in this time of severe labor shortage. We help by providing real-time visibility into what's sitting on the floor and arming decision-makers with real-time data across their networks.

We set out to build a scalable solution that empowers warehouse staff to become knowledge workers, streamline their operations and drive digital transformation. To make a significant impact across the industry, we must provide this solution with minimal CAPEX and no bottlenecks due to hardware manufacturing. This way, we enable our customers to compete with the Amazons of the world with low risk and easy implementation.

We are now ready with our software-only approach and the use of off-the-shelf drones.

Our founding thesis

In 2018 we spun out of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute with the dream of making data gathering in the physical world as easy as data gathering in the digital world.

Digital data can be gathered by simply querying databases. However, gathering data in the physical world is non-trivial. For example in warehouses, people often have to climb forklifts and go 50 feet off the ground just to capture a barcode so they can monitor their inventory. This is not only slow and unscalable but also dangerous.

We at Gather AI are enabling the gathering of such physical data like inventory at a press of a button, enabling real-time visibility and driving optimizations by the second. We are laser-focused on supply-chain data gathering and driving digital transformation for our customers with machine learning.

Growth thus far

We take pride in delighting our customers, and we saw tremendous growth last year thanks to their trust and our team's focus on driving customer success. Our customers are expanding the use of our solution throughout their networks and are gaining unprecedented inventory visibility. Since we launched, our software has scanned over 400,000 pallet locations and found tens of thousands of misplaced pallets. Surprisingly, we have also discovered several thousand pallets our customers didn't know they had as they didn't exist in the warehouse management system.

The benefits of real-time visibility have manifested as more efficient operations with improved checks and balances, faster cycle counts, pick rates, put-aways and lower attrition rates. Our customers have repeatedly told us that we've far exceeded their expectations on ROI, and a single drone saves them 3-5 shifts of work per day per facility. Such data points encourage us to generate value for more partners and have motivated us to fundraise to scale our business.

Scaling a world's first

This new financing will help us reach more customers and expand the depth of inventory insights we provide. We are also planning a significant expansion to the inventory workflows in our app and web dashboard, with new insights like facility utilization rates and damage detection, and furthering our market-leading ability to operate in very narrow aisles, narrower than 5'4". If you're interested in learning how our solution can change your operation, please get in touch with us to book a demo and see it in action.

Gratitude

Although we are using robotics to transform the supply chain, none of this would be possible without our amazing people at Gather AI, who help us demonstrate our people-first values to our customers daily. If you are a passionate problem solver that loves collaborating in the domains of Robotics, ML, Full-stack, Product, Marketing or Operations, we'd love to meet you. Please reach out directly at hiring [at] gather [dot] ai.