Gatik secures $200M to scale driverless middle-mile operations
Key takeaways
- Gatik is expanding its driverless trucking operations with backing from major customers and investors.
- The company aims to grow from dozens of autonomous trucks to several hundred by year’s end.
- Gatik’s rising contracted revenue points to growing demand for autonomous freight services.
Driverless trucking venture Gatik has finalized a $200 million financing round that co-founder and CEO Gautam Narang says will let the nine-year-old company “scale with speed and discipline.”
Narang and his team have built a customer roster that includes Walmart, Kroger, and Canada’s Loblaws chain, as well as PepsiCo, which expanded its work with Gatik this summer. Using Isuzu medium-duty trucks (the OEM invested $30 million in Gatik in 2024), the company focuses on high-frequency operations from distribution centers to stores. Coming into 2026, Gatik trucks had completed about 60,000 fully driverless deliveries. In announcing the $200 million in funding, Narang’s team said that number now stands at 85,000.
“This round […] is a clear validation of Gatik’s commercial leadership in autonomous freight,” Narang said in a statement. “We have built Gatik with real revenue, deep customer demand, and AI-driven autonomous technology proven every day in live supply chains. This round gives us the capital to scale with speed and discipline, serve the world’s largest companies, and define the future of autonomous freight.”
Leading the latest funding round for Gatik are the Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, the venture-capital arm of Koch Industries, which first invested in the company five years ago. Several other firms, including Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, also took part. Narang's near-term goal is to scale from dozens of driverless middle-mile trucks on the road to several hundred by year’s end.
The Gatik team said earlier this year that it had built a backlog of contracted revenue that topped $600 million and reiterated that figure in its funding announcement. But speaking on Bloomberg Tech August 25, Narang–who wouldn’t commit to saying the company’s operations have begun turning a profit–said that figure has “increased significantly” in recent months.
Those figures appear to put Gatik on a level similar to autonomous freight competitor Einride, whose executives recently said they plan to buy 500 Tesla Semi trucks in the next two years. Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli also noted that his team’s potential long-term annual revenues from business plans penciled out with customers, a measure roughly comparable to contracted revenue, albeit leaning a bit more on “potential,” have grown to about $800 million.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of experience in business journalism. Since 2021, he has written about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications FleetOwner, Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, Oil & Gas Journal, and T&D World.
With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati. He later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector and many of its publicly traded companies.