I’m thrilled to finally be funding an amazing company from my hometown of Pittsburgh — today we are welcoming Gather AI to the Bain Capital Ventures family. Gather AI’s drone vision software allows customers to overcome the most common warehouse inventory challenges.
We are proud to have led its Series A-1, with participation from Tribeca Venture Partners, Dundee Venture Capital, Expa and Bling Capital.
Gather AI’s co-founders are world-class robotics experts with excellent commercial instincts. Sankalp Arora, Daniel Maturana and Geetesh Dubey produced groundbreaking, award-winning work as part of Carnegie Mellon’s AirLab research center, including the world’s first autonomous helicopter. They’re joined on the commercial front by Pres/COO Charlie Reverte and CTO Andrew Hoffman, an alumnus of BCV portfolio company Kiva Systems.
Gather AI leverages off-the-shelf commercial drones with standard cameras to visually inspect and check the inventory in the warehouse. Its solution does not require ANY changes or add-ons to the off-the-shelf hardware — no changes to the camera, no addition of any specialized location beacons or wireless transmitters to the drone or the warehouse, and no need for other types of imaging devices.
The magic of Gather AI is the strength of their computer vision stack and autonomy stack. Its computer vision AI has been trained on millions of cases and pallets in the real world and thus can recognize even the messiest and damaged barcodes and labels on cases, delivering best in class precision and recall.
The result is that Gather AI’s customers can realize a massive ROI inside their warehouses with a very low total cost of ownership. The deployment is fast and simple and the solution simply works.
When we first met Gather, we were skeptical given the many venture-backed companies over the past 10 years that have tried to build custom drones to solve the warehouse visibility problem. Most of these companies have disappeared or have plodded along with only a handful of pilot sites. However, after spending time with the team, we were blown away by the elegance of the solution and their strong commercial traction with many customers already expanding to multiple facilities after seeing success in one site.
I’m looking forward to my next visit to the Gather AI HQ in Pittsburgh. Sankalp is vegetarian so we won't be eating at Primanti Brothers, but he has promised to take me to his favorite Indian restaurant!
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