Why innovation labs are not the greatest customers | Sankalp Arora

Gather AI builds a physical AI platform for logistics, using cameras on drones, forklifts, and static mounts to digitize warehouse operations into a real-time digital twin and orchestrate facilities with AI agents. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Sankalp Arora, Chief Executive Officer of Gather AI, to learn how 175 customer discovery interviews turned a drone autonomy engine into a warehouse intelligence platform with 150 percent annualized NRR. Topics Discussed: How Sankalp's PhD work at Carnegie Mellon on the world's first fully safe autonomous helicopter led to Gather AI Why the team pivoted at customer discovery interview 75, after learning that large companies wanted drones but did not know what to do with them How a single VentureBeat article in August 2019 generated about 10 leads a day, pre-product, with no SEO or ads Why innovation labs at large companies turned out to be poor customers, and why mid-market operators became the real early adopters The barcode reader benchmark: Gather AI's goal of becoming a default line item when someone stands up a facility How market education evolved from live robot demos to a testimonial and reference engine Why door to door sales failed, and what it revealed about where the buyer actually sits Why 150 percent annualized NRR was the signal to build a commercial team What an engineer learned about sales: it can be more formalized than engineering The current GTM bottleneck: seller onboarding speed against a six to nine month sales cycle GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons: Pivot on buyer behavior, not technical identity: The three grad student founders assumed they would sell the autonomy engine they were known for. Discovery interviews showed that large companies would buy the engine but did not know what to do with the drones. Treat pre-product demand as the market signal: The first investment came from the conviction of people who said if you build it, I'll buy it. When the company launched a website in August 2019 with nothing behind it but a VentureBeat article, leads arrived at about 10 a day with no ads or SEO. Qualify early adopters by pain, not by title: The initial inbound came from innovation labs at large companies with a mandate to explore the problem. They turned out not to be the greatest customers. The best customers were operators, mostly mid-market, whose problems the product addressed directly. Sell where the budget sits, not where the product runs: Sankalp personally ran door to door sales at warehouses and it failed completely. The buyer, usually a VP of operations or senior director of operations, sat at the corporate head office, not at the facility. Turn early adopters into the education engine: Market education moved through phases: showing up at facilities to prove the robot works, then making early adopters successful, then circulating their testimonials. For 3PLs like the ones Gather AI serves, being featured was mutual value, since claiming differentiated, forward-looking innovation in a crowded market made them look good, backed by real ROI. Use NRR as the scaling trigger: The signal to build a commercial team came when annualized NRR reached about 150 percent while new customer acquisition was starved of investment. Hire GTM leaders who think differently: Sankalp's first commercial hire thought like him, and he calls that fault an expensive learning for the org. Running a sales team requires a different aptitude than building a solution, so he now looks for shared values with different thinking and real domain expertise. // Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service