About this episode

Gautam Narang discusses Gatik's innovative approach to autonomous trucking and its partnerships with major brands.

Gautam Narang built India’s first customized humanoid robot as a teenager — then walked away from humanoids because they were nowhere near commercial. Today his company, Gatik, runs fully driverless trucks 24/7 across Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona for PepsiCo, Kroger, and Loblaw: dock to dock, no safety driver, no observer, no required remote monitoring. He tells Tasha Keeney and Daniel Maguire why Gatik took the contrarian bet on the middle mile while the rest of the industry chased long haul, how a $200,000-per-truck take-or-pay contract moves utilization risk off Gatik’s books, and why he believes autonomous trucking has moved from a technology challenge to an execution story. Key Points From This Episode: 00:00:00 Meet Gautam Narang, CEO and Co-founder of Gatik 00:05:49 The contrarian bet: why Gatik started with the middle mile 00:08:12 Dock to dock, and the interface problem nobody talks about 00:12:56 $200,000 per truck, take-or-pay: the business model explained 00:18:15 Inside the PepsiCo partnership: Frito, beverage, and dynamic routing 00:20:48 From 10-mile routes to 400-mile routes 00:32:12 A $300B market, and why the tech is platform agnostic 00:36:58 The $200M Series D…

People in this episode

Hosts: Tasha Keeney, Daniel Maguire

Guest: Gautam Narang

Topics covered

• autonomous trucking
• business model
• middle mile logistics
• technology execution
• partnerships
• utilization risk

Keywords

• driverless trucks
• Gatik
• autonomous vehicles
• middle mile
• business model
• PepsiCo
• Kroger
• logistics
• utilization risk

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Gatik, PepsiCo, Kroger, Loblaw, ARK

Places: Texas, Arkansas, Arizona

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