Gatik Raises $200 Million to Expand Autonomous Trucking Model

Autonomous trucking company Gatik has raised $200 million in new funding.

The new financing, announced in a news release Tuesday (Aug. 25), will help Gatik expand its model, designed to transport goods along what it calls the “high-frequency regional routes” linking distribution centers and stores.

“These routes are time-sensitive, operationally complex and essential to keeping shelves stocked as customer expectations shift toward faster, more predictable access to everyday products,” Gatik said in a news release.

The release notes that Gatik now has more than $600 million in contracted revenue and has completed 85,000 fully driverless orders, 99% of them on time. That’s up from the 60,000 figure the company announced in January.

Those driverless orders without completed incident, Gatik said at the time, logging more than 2,000 hours of operation and traveling more than 10,000 miles on public roads.

“We’ve long believed autonomous freight has the potential to improve the efficiency and reliability of supply chains,” said Byron Knight, president of Koch Disruptive Technologies, which helped lead the funding round.

“What we’re seeing today is autonomy moving beyond a promising technology into real-world commercial operations. Gatik has demonstrated a practical approach to that transition, and we look forward to supporting the company’s continued growth.”

Gatik was founded in 2017 by veterans of the autonomous technology industry to launch an “autonomous delivery as a service” solution that covered autonomous trucks, telematics and a dispatching solution, CEO Gautam Narang told PYMNTS in 2021. The company’s trucks have been used by both Walmart and Kroger.

“We handle everything from obviously the driving piece to the telematics piece, making sure that our customers have insight over their operations,” Narang said. “All those needs are taken care of by our solution. So, it’s not just the technology piece we are building that we’re providing, it’s the full service.”

In other news from the intersection of freight and automation, PYMNTS spoke earlier this month with André Luis Martins Filho, founder and CEO of Freight Hero, who said his freight broker customers still deal with a lot of problems manually despite technological advances.

“Our customers don’t want to become AI experts,” Martins Filho told PYMNTS. “They don’t want to fully understand and deep dive into the technology and understand the nuances and the intricacies of building your evolved system, of coordinating model optimization… They want to see their job done. They want to see their job done more efficiently, and in a scalable way that preserves their costs.”