Gatik Raises $200 Million for Driverless Middle-Mile Trucking, Building on PepsiCo Deal
Gatik, a Santa Clara-based startup building autonomous trucks for middle-mile logistics, has raised $200 million in a funding round led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies. The round also included Millennium Management, ARK Invest, and Intact Private Capital, according to TechCrunch. The company did not disclose its valuation.
The round is Gatik's largest to date and brings total funding to roughly $500 million since the company came out of stealth mode in 2019. It follows by about two months a multi-year commercial agreement with PepsiCo, now Gatik's largest public partnership. Under that deal, 41 driverless box trucks move Frito-Lay products from distribution centers to retail locations across Dallas, Phoenix, and Northwest Arkansas.
Gatik focuses on a segment of autonomous freight that has proven more tractable than long-haul highway trucking or urban robotaxis: fixed, repetitive routes between distribution centers and stores, typically on surface roads rather than interstates. Middle-mile logistics refers to the leg of the supply chain that connects large warehouses to local stores or fulfillment centers — the distance is short enough that the routes stay predictable, which narrows the self-driving problem considerably. Gatik's customers include Loblaw, Walmart, and PepsiCo, with completed deliveries for Kroger and Tyson Foods as well.
Last year, Gatik reached a milestone that let it remove the safety driver — a human operator who rides along as a backup — from its commercial routes. The company now runs dozens of fully driverless trucks commercially across several markets. CEO and co-founder Gautam Narang said Gatik has locked in commercial deals worth $600 million in contracted revenue, pointing to a pipeline that extends well beyond currently deployed operations.
Gatik plans to use the new capital to hire engineers and operational staff and to expand into new markets or deepen its presence in existing ones. The company has not specified which markets are under consideration.
The funding trajectory provides useful context. Gatik's previous major round was an $85 million Series B led by Koch Disruptive Technologies in August 2021, which brought total funding at that point to $114.5 million and coincided with new operations in Texas (The Robot Report; Yahoo Finance). Koch Disruptive Technologies returning as a lead investor in the current round signals continued conviction from a backer that has now funded Gatik across multiple stages. The jump from $85 million to $200 million in round size, alongside new institutional names like Millennium Management and ARK Invest, reflects a company that has moved from pilot deployments to contracted commercial revenue at a scale that attracts cross-over capital — investment funds that bridge late-stage private backing and public-market investing.
The broader context here is one of convergence between autonomous technology readiness and enterprise logistics demand. Middle-mile autonomy has several structural advantages: routes are bounded and predictable, speed requirements are lower than highway trucking, and the operational problem reduces to running the same corridors repeatedly rather than generalizing to arbitrary road networks. That doesn't make it trivial, but it narrows the autonomy problem in ways that matter for deployment timelines.
The PepsiCo deployment is instructive. Forty-one driverless trucks running Frito-Lay freight across three metropolitan areas is not a pilot. It is a commercial operation generating contracted revenue, and it is running without safety drivers. The $600 million in contracted revenue that Narang cites gives a sense of the forward pipeline, though contracted revenue and realized revenue are different things, and the gap between them depends on execution speed, fleet scaling, and market expansion.
One thing worth noting is the absence of a disclosed valuation for a round of this size. In the current funding environment, where autonomous vehicle companies have faced compressed valuations and several have consolidated or shuttered, an undisclosed valuation could cut either way. It may reflect strong negotiating leverage on Gatik's part, or it may reflect a round priced at terms the company prefers not to publicize. Without the number, the market can only judge by the operational evidence: driverless trucks, contracted revenue, and repeat institutional backing.
What the funding enables is straightforward. More engineers to iterate on the autonomy stack — the software and sensor systems that handle perception, planning, and control — more operational staff to manage fleet deployment, and capital to open new corridors. The middle-mile segment has been one of the quieter success stories in autonomous vehicles, precisely because it does not require solving general-purpose autonomy. Gatik's $200 million round is a bet that the narrow problem it has chosen is large enough to build a durable business, and that the operational proof is now sufficient to scale it.
