ExtraMile by KnowledgeNile is your gateway to the future of tech alongside experts across industries. In each edition, we discuss the latest innovations, marketing strategies, tech practices, and more.
For today’s exclusive session, we are delighted to feature Arjun Narang, the Co-Founder and CTO of Gatik, a pioneer in autonomous transportation and freight. Gatik’s AI and data-driven autonomy across regional logistics have helped the firm to become one of the leading autonomous freight networks.
With expertise in robotics and AI innovation, Arjun leads Gatik’s engineering and AI teams while making advancements in driverless freight operations. He has been determined to commercialize and scale Gatik’s autonomous transportation technology more safely.
Let’s explore how Arjun’s background in robotics and AI laid the foundation of Gatik. Alongside that, discuss Gatik’s key goals, freight-only or driverless operations, AI, and data-driven autonomous transportation, among others.
Hello, Arjun; hope you are doing well!
You have been associated with research for years. How did your research background assist in establishing Gatik? What primary vision did you and your co-founders set for the firm?
Arjun. My research in robotics and AI gave me two critical perspectives that directly shaped Gatik’s foundation. First, I learned the depth of technical rigor required to build autonomous systems that are not just experimental, but truly safe, validated, and scalable in the real world. Second, I recognized a fundamental challenge in the AV industry - overextending autonomy into unconstrained, highly complex scenarios, which slowed meaningful commercialization.
When we started Gatik, our vision was intentionally contrarian. Instead of solving autonomy everywhere, we focused on a domain where it creates immediate and measurable value - middle-mile B2B logistics. By focusing on fixed, repeatable routes in well-defined environments, we engineered a highly reliable autonomy stack, rigorously validated through rigorous, third-party safety assessments. This structured, deliberate approach enabled us to achieve industry-first milestones, including the world’s first fully driverless commercial operations for our customers like Walmart, and set a new benchmark for how autonomy can be deployed responsibly and successfully in real-world logistics.
Give us an overview of Gatik's customer base. Who exactly do you target, and what is your segmentation strategy?
Arjun. Gatik’s customer base spans Fortune 500 retailers, grocers, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, and leading food and beverage brands. Beyond grocery and retail, we serve logistics intensive sectors that require consistent, high-frequency movement of goods between distribution hubs, fulfillment centers, and retail locations. Our partners include some of the most recognized names in retail and logistics - Walmart, Kroger, Tyson Foods, and Loblaw - all of whom share a critical need for reliable, high-uptime goods movement.
What’s especially exciting is that many of our customers have already transitioned from pilot programs to long-term, multi-year growth contracts - reflecting both the maturity of our technology and the immediate ROI we deliver. To support this expansion, we’re establishing a dedicated production and assembly facility, ensuring we can scale deployments efficiently with speed and efficiency.
Our strategy focuses on automating Regional Distribution Networks in industries where uptime, consistency, and safety are non-negotiable - retail, CPG, and food and beverage. By transforming this critical segment of the supply chain, Gatik helps customers boost efficiency, lower costs, strengthen network resilience, and address persistent labor shortages, setting a new standard for the future of autonomous logistics.
Gatik has taken a significant step towards strengthening its leadership team by appointing the first CFO and Chief Legal Officer, alongside forming a Safety Advisory Council. How will such a breakthrough contribute to the company's growth?
Arjun. These leadership additions mark a pivotal next phase of growth for Gatik. Our new CFO and Chief Legal Officer bring deep expertise in scaling businesses responsibly, strengthening financial discipline, guiding long-term strategic investments, and navigating the complex regulatory and legal landscape that comes with scaling autonomous technology.
Equally important is the formation of our Safety Advisory Council, which reinforces our uncompromising commitment to safety. This isn’t just about governance or optics; it ensures that safety is deeply embedded as a core operating discipline, guided by independent leaders in transportation safety and public policy as we expand driverless operations into new markets.
Beyond internal governance, we’ve gone a step further by subjecting our autonomous operations to rigorous third-party safety audits - an industry-first approach that validates our technology against the highest safety standards. Earlier this year, we publicly released our comprehensive safety framework, setting a new benchmark for transparency and accountability. This proactive, independently verified approach ensures Gatik is not only leading in driverless technology but defining the gold standard for safety in autonomous logistics.
Gatik proclaims to offer safer B2B delivery and logistics services. How do you accomplish this goal while providing seamless solutions?
Arjun. While most of the AV industry relies on internal assessments, we took the unprecedented step by developing and subjecting the most comprehensive Safety Assessment Framework in autonomous logistics to independent, third-party evaluation. This framework spans more than 700 safety requirements covering every critical pillar of autonomy - functional, behavioral, and operational safety; cybersecurity; vehicle integrity; and organizational safety culture - and conforms to UL 4600 and other leading global standards. To ensure transparency and accountability, we engaged two of the world’s most respected safety organizations: TÜV SÜD and Edge Case Research. TÜV SÜD validated our safety case and functional safety approach against its Autonomous Vehicle Conformity Framework, which encompasses everything from ODD (Operational Design Domain) definition and hazard/risk analysis to coverage testing and safety governance.
This dual independent verification goes far beyond regulatory requirements or voluntary self-assessments. It provides our stakeholders - customers, regulators, first responders, and the public - with the highest degree of confidence that our Freight-Only autonomous operations are built on a foundation of proven safety. We’re not just deploying autonomous trucks - we’re deploying a solution that has been validated against the most stringent international standards. It’s an extra layer of accountability that sets Gatik apart in an industry where self-certification is the norm. By holding ourselves to this higher standard, we’ve raised the bar for the entire sector while delivering safer, more predictable, and more resilient logistics networks at scale.
Gatik is known for its Freight-Only or driverless operations. How did technological aspects lead you to adopt such an approach?
Arjun. Our decision to specialize in freight-only, middle-mile routes was highly intentional. These routes present a uniquely controlled environment - no passenger dynamics, reduced operational complexity, and inherently high route predictability. This focus enables us to deploy autonomy with greater speed and reliability, while unlocking measurable value for our partners at scale.
From a technology perspective, we’ve built an autonomy stack specifically optimized for this application. Our mapping pipeline combines high-precision, semantically rich maps with real-time perception updates to maintain highly accurate localization. Multi-modal sensor fusion - integrating LiDAR, radar, and vision through deep neural networks - delivers robust detection, classification, and tracking in a wide range of conditions. This is underpinned by a high-performance, fault-tolerant compute architecture with hardware redundancy, real-time failover mechanisms, and an adaptive learning framework. Real-world driving experience is enhanced with extensive simulation, enabling iterative refinement and ensuring resilience across diverse geographies and rare edge-case scenarios.
By narrowing the operational design domain, we accelerate validation cycles, achieve superior system reliability, and drive faster commercialization compared to broad, one-size-fits-all autonomous approaches. This is not about limiting ambition; it’s about disciplined innovation - leveraging autonomy where it delivers the greatest impact today, while building a scalable foundation for the logistics networks of tomorrow.
What opportunities and threats do driverless transportation involve? How are you embracing the opportunities and eliminating the threats?
Arjun. The opportunities are transformative. Autonomous trucking has the potential to redefine regional logistics networks, making supply chains faster, more resilient, and more sustainable. By automating the middle mile, we help Fortune 500 companies overcome persistent labor shortages, reduce operating costs, improve delivery frequency, and ultimately lower emissions. Beyond efficiency, autonomy unlocks greater predictability and safety by eliminating risks caused by human error, such as fatigue or distraction, which account for the vast majority of roadway accidents today.
But we also recognize that with such disruptive technology come significant challenges. Public trust, regulatory alignment, and the safe management of rare edge cases cannot be overlooked. That’s why Gatik has chosen a focused, incremental approach - operating on fixed, repeatable routes within well-defined ODDs, which dramatically reduce system complexity and risk.
To address safety head-on, we’ve gone beyond industry norms with a comprehensive Safety Assessment Framework encompassing more than 700 safety requirements across technology, operations, cybersecurity, and organizational safety culture. This framework was independently validated by TÜV SÜD which is one of the world’s most trusted safety authorities, validating our Safety Case and Functional Safety processes against globally recognized standards.
Moreover, we collaborate closely with regulators, policymakers, and local communities, and our independent Safety Advisory Council - composed of former government leaders and transportation experts - provides ongoing oversight. Combined with high-fidelity simulation, real-world testing at scale, and redundancy built into every layer of our stack, these measures ensure that Gatik’s technology is deployed with unmatched reliability and integrity.
By coupling opportunity with responsibility, we’re not just deploying driverless technology - we’re building trust, setting new industry benchmarks, and ensuring that autonomy delivers enduring value for businesses, communities, and society.
Autonomous transportation is truly a tech for tomorrow. How is AI and data-driven research making such innovation successful and impactful?
Arjun. AI is the core enabler of our autonomous platform, powering everything from high-res perception, prediction to real-time decision-making. Every mile driven in the physical world or simulated in high-fidelity virtual environments feeds into our closed-loop learning systems, continuously refining and improving our models. This iterative, data-driven process enhances prediction accuracy, optimizes planning under dynamic conditions, and increases overall system robustness.
What differentiates Gatik is our structured operational approach. By focusing on fixed, repeatable routes within well-defined ODDs, we reduce environmental complexity and enable our AI models to achieve unparalleled reliability and explainability. This stability allows us to optimize AI performance with less data but higher precision, accelerating validation cycles and ensuring safer, faster deployment at scale.
We also leverage advanced simulation at massive scale, running scenario-based edge cases that would take years to encounter in the real world. Combined with real-world fleet telemetry, this hybrid learning loop builds a richer, more robust dataset to handle rare events, adverse weather, and high-speed highway driving.
Ultimately, it’s not just about developing cutting-edge AI - it’s about applying it intelligently to deliver real-world impact today. By pairing sophisticated AI with a targeted use case like middle-mile logistics, we’re solving a high-value, high-frequency problem that creates immediate economic and operational benefits for our customers, while laying the groundwork for broader adoption of autonomous transportation.
What is the future of autonomous transportation as a service (ATaaS)? How do you plan to meet the target audience's changing needs while staying energy efficient?
Arjun. The future of Autonomous Transportation-as-a-Service (ATaaS) lies in creating solutions that are highly specialized yet inherently scalable. As supply chains become more complex and consumer expectations accelerate, autonomous delivery will play a critical role in reducing bottlenecks, lowering costs, and enhancing reliability for businesses operating at scale. Autonomous delivery will be the backbone of this infrastructure, redefining how goods move between regional hubs, distribution centers, and retail locations.
At Gatik, we’re future-proofing ATaaS by engineering for efficiency from the ground up and focusing on fixed, repeatable routes within regional distribution networks, minimizing operational complexity and maximizing predictability. This deliberate focus enables higher vehicle utilization, reduced variability, and faster safety validation, unlocking immediate and measurable ROI for our customers.
Today, our autonomous fleet is primarily ICE (Internal Combustion Engine)-based, optimized for the unique requirements of Freight-Only middle-mile logistics. However, as electric platforms with the right payload, range, and cost profiles become widely available, we’re ready to seamlessly integrate them - just as we demonstrated in our early electric pilot deployments with Walmart in New Orleans. By staying platform-agnostic, we’re ensuring that our technology evolves with emerging vehicle and energy solutions, without compromising reliability or scale.
The future of ATaaS isn’t just about moving goods faster - it’s about moving them smarter, safer, and more sustainably over time. By combining autonomy with an approach that scales responsibly – and eventually integrates electrification - we’re building the foundation for next-generation logistics networks that are more efficient, predictable, and resilient for the businesses and communities we serve.
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