Gautam Narang (MRSD ’15) co-founded Gatik in 2017, and he is the CEO. In August 2021, Gatik became the first autonomous trucking company worldwide to operate fully driverless, middle-mile commercial deliveries. The company makes daily runs on a fixed, repeatable route for Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas, delivering customer orders from a dark store to a Neighborhood Market. Gatik’s fully driverless deliveries are enabling Walmart to safely and efficiently optimize its short-haul logistics, reduce labor costs, and operate more sustainably. The removal of the safety driver represents a historic milestone in commercializing autonomous delivery safely and at scale.
As e-commerce sales continue to grow at an unprecedented rate, so does consumer demand for curbside pickup and same-day delivery, pushing retailers to build their distribution networks closer to their end-consumers and creating greater demand for middle-mile delivery solutions. Gatik’s autonomous fleet addresses these needs and is capable of running up to 22 hours per day, seven days a week – meaning each vehicle can make multiple deliveries to a single destination each day. The company also operates multi-tenancy models to maximize efficiency, for example by delivering high-priority goods such as perishables during the day and lower-priority products such as electronics by night on the same delivery routes.
Amid a massive labor shortage in the trucking industry, Gatik is enabling its customers to achieve significant savings in middle-mile logistics costs across labor, fuel, and operations, and also facilitate sustainable, real-time access to goods for today’s consumer.
You can learn more about Gatik here and here – and, of course, on their website.