Collect AI, a maker of ‘active’ storage drones, has raised $40M in a venture led by Keith Block.

Gather AI, a startup that provides an AI platform for warehouse cameras and drones, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Smith Point Capital. It is a VC firm founded by former Salesforce Co-CEO Keith Block.

The Gather team first met Smith Point a year ago at a content management conference, and “it took Keith and his team five minutes to figure out what we were doing,” co-founder and CEO Sankalp Arora told TechCrunch.

What Save the AI doing is unusual. The four inventors met as PhD students at Carnegie Mellon University, where they built one of the first autonomous helicopters and tested it at the FBI training facility in Quantico. (Block is a CMU trustee.)

In 2017, the founders took what they learned from training helicopters to fly and land safely and launched Gather AI. Using off-the-shelf cameras mounted on mobile equipment such as forklifts, as well as drones flying around the warehouse, the cameras monitor floor operations and record what they find in the warehouse.

But surprisingly, AI is not limited to what it analyzes. It is “being curious,” as Arora described it.

“My PhD project looks at how to make different flying robots more interesting,” he said. “So they’re curious about boxes and bar codes and workflows.”

In addition to barcodes, they look for lot codes, labels, expiration dates, case counts, damage, occupancy, and other items. The idea is that they will find and predict things like inventory shortages, faulty stocks, and workflows that could cause safety issues.

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

Because Gather’s underlying technology was built years before the main languages, this is not the type of AI that LLM uses.

Arora explains: “It’s not neural networks that end there. It’s traditional Bayesian methods, combined with neural networks.”

AI vision Bayesian methods use basic techniques to teach computers how to interpret visual cues. These systems allow technology to learn using data and prior knowledge to make decisions – meaning they don’t suffer from the magical challenges of an LLM.

Instead, they are “intrigued,” as Arora puts it, to gather information (hence the founder’s name) and make a decision about what they’ve learned based on what they’ve learned.

As old school as this sounds, Gather AI has been on the cusp of the next big thing in AI, Sometimes called “embedded AI.” These are robots that interact with the real world, as opposed to LLM interacting through a computer chat or web application.

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

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