Gatik Driver

Gatik was founded in 2017 in Mountain View, California, by Gautam Narang, Arjun Narang and Apeksha Kumavat, and it chose the least glamorous slice of trucking on purpose. Not long-haul interstates, not urban delivery, but the middle mile: the fixed, repetitive runs between a distribution centre and the stores it supplies, driven several times a day, usually on the same roads, in medium-duty box trucks rather than 40-tonne semis. The strategic reasoning behind that choice is what separates Gatik from its better-funded rivals. A route that repeats does not need a system that can drive anywhere — it needs a system that drives one road extremely well, and the same road can be surveyed, mapped and rehearsed until the residual risk is small enough to remove the human. Gatik calls this 'structured autonomy'. Class 6 and 7 box trucks are also lighter, slower and shorter than a Class 8 tractor-trailer, which makes braking distances and failure modes easier to reason about. The results arrived in that order. Gatik started commercial deliveries for Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2019, and in 2021 removed the safety driver on a Walmart route — the world's first fully driverless commercial delivery run by an autonomous trucking company. In Canada it did the same with Loblaw. By January 2026 the company reported over two million commercial orders since 2019, and — since going 'freight-only' in mid-2025 — 60,000 fully driverless orders with no incident, more than 2,000 hours and over 10,000 driverless miles on public roads, day and night, on highways as well as surface streets. It claims more than 600 million dollars of contracted revenue, from customers including Walmart, Kroger, Tyson Foods, Loblaw and PepsiCo. The current system, the third generation of Gatik Driver, runs on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX compute with the DRIVE Thor system-on-chip, a partnership announced in 2025 alongside Isuzu. The three companies are building a plant in South Carolina intended to mass-produce Level 4 trucks from the second half of 2027 — the point at which autonomy stops being a retrofit and starts coming off the line. In March 2026 Gatik joined NVIDIA's Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab, an external safety-assessment programme. The caveat is scale. Ten thousand driverless miles is a rounding error next to what a single human trucking fleet covers in a week, and Gatik's advantage — routes that repeat — is also its ceiling: every new lane is a new engineering project. But of everyone in autonomous trucking, Gatik is the company whose driverless trucks are most reliably carrying paying freight today, and it got there by making the problem smaller instead of larger.

▸Videos

No videos yet.

▸Reviews