Flying warehouse drone provider Gather AI today said it has raised $17 million from investment firm Bain Capital Ventures for its airborne robots that conduct inventory counts inside the DC.
The round was led by Bain, with participation from Tribeca Venture Partners, Dundee Venture Capital, Expa, and Bling Capital. It marks a total of $34 million raised to date and will be used to scale operations as Gather AI continues to attract customers by solving supply chain issues with richer data and AI, the firm said.
Pittsburgh-based Gather AI--which calls itself an "autonomous inventory monitoring company"--says that warehouse operators typically combat low accuracy with cycle counting via barcode scanning, but capacity constraints make it difficult for workers to survey the full warehouse. That leads to inaccurate inventory which can cost a business hundreds of thousands per year per warehouse and significant revenue loss in missed orders.
“Gather AI’s cutting-edge computer vision and workflow software, purpose-built for inventory monitoring, has seen significant commercial adoption and rapid growth separating them from the field of other venture-backed startups,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said in a release. “We are excited to welcome Gather AI to our portfolio of companies such as Kiva, ShipBob, FourKites, and Vention that are leveraging AI and software in the physical world.”
The funding follows news in December that Gather had hired a founding engineer from Amazon Robotics as its new chief technology officer.
