GATIK

Gautam Narang and his brother Arjun, along with Apeksha Kumavat, founded Gatik in 2017 after spending years in the autonomous vehicle industry. They worked at companies including Carnegie Robotics and saw firsthand how the AV industry was obsessed with the hardest problem: fully autonomous driving in dense urban environments.

The Narangs had a different idea. What if you focused on the middle mile?

The middle mile is the movement of goods from distribution centers to stores. These are fixed routes, repeated daily, on known roads with predictable traffic patterns.

It is a dramatically simpler problem than navigating downtown San Francisco at rush hour.

Gatik pitched Walmart in 2019 and landed a pilot almost immediately. Walmart was the perfect partner because they have hundreds of distribution centers and thousands of stores connected by fixed routes.

The pilot started in Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart's headquarters, hauling goods between a dark store and nearby Walmart Neighborhood Markets.

Gatik operates autonomous delivery trucks as a service for retail and logistics customers. The company owns and operates the trucks, charging customers a per-mile or per-route fee.

This is a transportation-as-a-service model rather than a technology licensing model.

The economics work because the middle mile is a massive, predictable expense for retailers. Walmart alone spends billions annually moving goods between distribution centers and stores.

If Gatik can do it cheaper and more reliably with autonomous trucks, the savings flow directly to the retailer's bottom line. The fixed-route nature means utilization rates are high and downtime is low.

Gatik's autonomous delivery system operates on medium-duty box trucks (Class 3 to Class 6). The trucks are equipped with cameras, LiDAR, and radar.

The system handles fixed routes between warehouses and retail stores, including highway driving, turns, traffic signals, and parking lot navigation.

The key feature is route reliability. Because Gatik trucks drive the same routes daily, the system builds an extremely detailed understanding of each route over time.

Every pothole, traffic pattern, and seasonal change gets learned. This repeated-route advantage means the system gets more reliable the longer it operates on a given corridor, which is the opposite of the long-tail problem that plagues general-purpose AV systems.

Landing Walmart was the growth hack. When the world's largest retailer publicly says they are using your autonomous trucks for daily deliveries, every other retailer and logistics company takes notice.

Gatik expanded the Walmart partnership from a pilot to ongoing commercial operations in multiple states.

In 2022, Gatik became one of the first autonomous trucking companies to remove the safety driver entirely on certain routes. Fully driverless trucks operating on public roads for commercial delivery.

This was a major milestone that attracted additional customers and investors. The company also partnered with Loblaw, Canada's largest grocery retailer, for autonomous deliveries in Ontario.

Scaling from a few trucks in Arkansas to a national fleet is the hard part. Each new market requires regulatory approval, route mapping, and infrastructure setup.

Gatik has expanded to Texas, Louisiana, and Kansas, but covering Walmart's entire US network would require thousands of trucks.

There is also the technology risk that the middle mile will become a feature, not a product. Waymo and Aurora are both capable of highway driving.

If a general-purpose AV system can handle both city streets and highway routes, the specialization advantage of a middle-mile-only company diminishes. Gatik is betting that focus beats generality.

Koch Disruptive Technologies led Gatik's Series B in 2021, investing alongside Wittington Ventures and FM Capital. Koch's investment brought strategic value because Koch Industries operates one of the largest logistics networks in North America.

Earlier investors include Intact Ventures and Innovation Endeavors. The Walmart partnership also came with development funding.

Total disclosed funding is approximately $121 million.