So does Pensa Systems, Vimaan, Intelligent Flying Machines, Vtrus and Verity.īut 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. Boston-based Corvus Robotics, too, leverages indoor drones to help warehouses keep track of stock. Gather isn’t the first to market with a drone-based inventory monitoring system. “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.” “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. 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 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. 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.Īrora co-founded Gather AI in 2019 with Daniel Maturana and Geetesh Dubey, graduate students at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.

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.

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