Announcing our $17M fundraise from Bain Capital Ventures

March 27, 2023 - Today, we announced our $17M capital raise led by Bain Capital Ventures. I am proud of our team of Gatherers for generating customer delight and momentum since our last $10M raise in August 2022.  This new round was over-subscribed with strong support from our existing investors, Tribeca, Bling, Dundee, and Expa. Since our last round, we have expanded into more facilities with our existing customers like Dnata/Emirates Air Cargo, Barrett Distribution, and AAFES and added new organizations including Axon, NFI, DSV, and GEODIS. We more than tripled the number of facilities we support since the last round and, on average, reduced misplaced inventory errors by 66% in the facilities we are deployed in, resulting in an average payback period of less than six months for our customers. This fundraising is going to fuel our accelerating growth and help us bring new products to market.

Partnering with Industry Veterans

Our progress has led us to partner with a veteran of the industry—Ajay Agarwal from Bain Capital. He deeply understands the space and shares our vision of real-time visibility in warehouses, as shown by his portfolio of investments in the supply chain and warehouse space, including ShipBob, FourKites, Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), Vention, Cofactr, and Pallet. We are excited to build together.

Rich data with ease of adoption

I recognize our customers in this blog, as they are the reason we exist. Our customers are leading the way in providing real-time inventory visibility to their stakeholders through us, and we are grateful to be of service. Customer-centricity is the core tenet at Gather AI. It has led us to design a product that provides our customers with rich, actionable inventory data at the press of a button. Barrett Distribution, for example, has been able to reduce from using six forklifts for inventory monitoring in a facility to using a single drone, Langham Distribution has been able to reduce inventory fire drills by 90%, NFI and GEODIS are seeing 3-5X operational efficiency gains.

Three things have led to such impactful partnerships with our users - 

1. Images for rich data insights: We capture much richer data because our drones are taking pictures, not scanning barcodes. In addition to barcodes, our image-processing AI can read text, lot codes, and expiration dates. It can even estimate case counts and confirm empty locations using the 3D structure of the image. Providing such rich insights gives our customers visual traceability to maximize inventory placement accuracy, reduce miss-picks, streamline putaway, and virtually walk their warehouses from anywhere in the world. 
2. Fast ROI: Our AI and computer vision engine lets us use commoditized off-the-shelf hardware. Using commodity hardware enables us to focus on delivering essential, rich inventory data. Our customers incur no capital costs, ensuring that they get a fast ROI (typically less than six months).
3. No infrastructure change in the warehouse: Recognizing warehouse operational challenges, we provide such data while requiring no active infrastructure changes, not even power drops or Wi-Fi. We have often not even needed IT integrations in the facilities. This enables our solution to have a low adoption barrier and minimum time to value. 

Future roadmap

We're just scratching the surface of what AI and image-based computer vision can do in the warehouse. Computer vision will impact supply chain traceability similarly to barcodes did in the 1980s and 1990s. We have a lot of exciting releases in the pipeline, including taking our vision engine to cameras on forklifts, dock doors, and yards. As always, thank you for supporting Gather AI. We're excited to be on this journey with you. Please contact us to learn how we deliver the future of supply chain visibility to you.