Mountain View, California-based Gatik, a market leader in middle mile logistics, has revealed that Arjun Narang, CTO and co-founder, has been named one of Business Insider’s Self-Driving Power Players of 2022.
The annual award showcases the autonomous vehicle industry’s most influential leaders who are redefining the sector, developing the next generation of autonomous technology and building industry-changing companies.
Narang was recognized for his leadership role in the development, strategy, execution and integration of Gatik’s commercial-grade technology for fully driverless medium-duty trucks, establishing multi-year technical partnerships and doubling the size of Gatik’s world-class engineering team in the past 12 months.
Gatik’s commercial success in the AV industry can be attributed to its strategy to approach the target market by structuring autonomy for fixed, repeatable middle-mile journeys leading to maximum safety.
Narang has led a focused engineering effort, providing direction on the technical solutions for an execution towards autonomy, identifying the right technical partners and building strong relationships to deliver on the commercial driverless middle-mile operations. This approach enabled Gatik to successfully remove the driver in Arkansas much more quickly than companies specializing in other applications and deliver the true advantages of autonomous delivery.
“It’s an honor to be recognized on this distinguished list by Business Insider,” Narang said. “The recognition is a testament to the revolutionary approach we’ve taken to commercializing autonomous goods movement at scale, and further validation of the groundbreaking technical milestones we’ve achieved with our fully driverless solution.”
Narang co-founded Gatik in 2017 and has spent over a decade working in the robotics and AV space with expertise in perception, sensor fusion-based SLAM, probabilistic modeling and multi-task learning. Prior to Gatik, he led research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, building robots and intelligent systems that are able to operate autonomously in complex and open-ended environments.
He has made critical research contributions in the field of autonomous systems at Japan’s Waseda University, CUNY and Carnegie Robotics. Narang earned his master’s of science degree (with a focus on robotics and AI) from Purdue University and B.E. from BITS Pilani, India.
Business Insider considered nominations for this year’s list from 100 leading experts across the self-driving vehicle industry. Each nominee was judged based on experience, significance to their company and contributions to the self-driving industry.
Individuals selected were chosen due to their role in defining the next-generation of self-driving vehicles and launching the industry forward as it embarks on the next wave of development and deployment.
Gatik delivers goods safely using its fleet of light and medium duty trucks. The company focuses on short-haul, B2B logistics for Fortune 500 retailers and in 2021 launched the world’s first fully driverless commercial delivery service with Walmart. Gatik’s class 3-6 autonomous box trucks are commercially deployed in multiple markets including Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Ontario.
Gatik is backed by Koch Disruptive Technologies, Innovation Endeavors and Wittington Ventures and partners with industry leaders including Ryder, Goodyear and Isuzu.
For more information, visit gatik.ai.
