Gatik, a Silicon Valley startup developing self-driving delivery trucks, says its commercial operations are about to scale up dramatically, from fewer than a dozen driverless units running in multiple U.S. states now to hundreds of box trucks by the end of the year. CEO Gautam Narang said it’s also booked contracts with retailers worth at least $600 million for its automated fleet.
“We have 10 fully driverless, revenue-generating trucks on public roads. Very soon, in the coming weeks, we expect that increase to 60 trucks,” he told Forbes. “We expect to end the year with hundreds of driverless trucks – revenue-generating – deployed across multiple markets in the U.S.”
Though the Mountain View, California-based company hasn’t raised as much funding as rivals, including Aurora, Kodiak and Canada’s Waabi, Gatik said it’s actually scaling up faster than any other robot truck developer. Unlike those companies, it focuses on smaller freight delivery vehicles, rather than full-size semis, supplied by truckmaker Isuzu that operate mainly between warehouses and supermarkets and other large stores. The company’s focus has been on so-called middle-mile trucking, which, like long-haul routes, has a severe shortage of human drivers, according to Narang. Currently, its trucks are on the road in Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, Nebraska and Ontario, Canada.
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The company has been generating revenue since shortly after its founding in 2017, hauling loads for customers like Walmart in trucks with human safety drivers at the wheel. Beginning late last year, it began shifting to fully driverless units and is getting more trucks from Isuzu built specifically to incorporate its tech, Narang said. “The hardware that we are using, this is our latest generation, has been designed to enable driver-out across thousands of trucks.”
After years of delay and failed attempts by startups including TuSimple, Otto, Embark and Starsky Robotics, robotic trucks, like the robotaxi market created by Alphabet’s Waymo, are showing renewed life. This week, Canada’s Waabi raised $750 million to help get large numbers of autonomous Volvo big rigs on the road, while Applied Intuition is working with Gatik’s truck supplier Isuzu to automate semis in Japan, where the driver shortage is even more intense than in the U.S.
Gatik has raised about $270 million, including from Koch Industries, customers like Canadian supermarket operator Loblaws and Japan’s Nippon Express, and is currently valued at more than $800 million. It’s “always evaluating” additional funding options, Narang said, without providing specific details.
“What I can confirm is that there is a strong interest and demand from the investor base. The fact that we are proving the technology works, have the right commercial demand, have the right ecosystem to scale, this is exactly what investors in the economy space have been waiting for a long time,” he said.
