Gather AI: $15M Revenue With Drones and 170% Net Retention - Sankalp Arora
Release Date: 06/17/2026
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info_outlineHow do you build a $15M revenue business by teaching autonomous drones to find missing sneakers in warehouses, and get customers to more than double their spend every single year?
Sankalp Arora is the founder and CEO of Gather AI, a physical AI company that uses autonomous drones and computer vision to track inventory in real time across warehouses. He holds a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, built the world's first safe autonomous helicopter for DARPA, and today has 30 to 40 customers paying an average of $500K per year with net revenue retention of 170%.
You'll learn:
- Why Sankalp spent three years writing code with zero revenue before getting his first customer in 2021
- How a $2 warehouse pick turns into a $15 pick because of one inventory location error, and how Gather cut that by 70% for Barrett
- The land and expand math: customers start with 5 facilities and expand to 100 within three years at $500K per facility network
- Why 170% net revenue retention is possible when your product is embedded in daily warehouse operations
- How Gather AI built neural nets that can read barcodes a standard grocery store scanner cannot, with no human annotation required
- Why Sankalp passed on big-name VCs and chose Smith Point Capital, founded by Keith Block, former CEO of Salesforce
- The forklift vision product that turns any warehouse into an Amazon Go store using off-the-shelf hardware from Best Buy
- How Sankalp was carrying suicidal thoughts since his teenage years and only discovered life without them a year and a half ago, while building a company past $9M in revenue
- The Series B math: $40M raised at roughly $270M to $400M valuation selling 10 to 15% of the business at $15M in revenue
- Why Gather AI is touching just 0.1% of its addressable market today, and what 1% would actually mean in dollar terms
Connect:
YouTube: Nathan Latka
Gather.ai: gather.ai
Founderpath: founderpath.com