Why Some Of America’s Biggest Brands Are Going Driverless

**Gautam Narang** (0:00)
Two years back, I remember the conversation was like, is this technology real? Would autonomous truck happen? It's not a nice to have, it's a have to have. I come from a robotics background, and I say this jokingly, that I hate robots because they fail all the time. Huge need, huge market, technology is ready. It's more of an execution story.

**Tasha Keeney** (0:24)
Welcome to FYI, The For Your Innovation Podcast.
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**SPEAKER_3** (0:42)
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**Tasha Keeney** (1:16)
Welcome back to FYI. We're here with Gautam Narang, CEO and co-founder of Gatik.
Gautam, thanks for joining us.

**Gautam Narang** (1:23)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Tasha Keeney** (1:25)
Gatik is a leader in the middle mile autonomous truck space. We've been investors for some time.
Tell us about the founding story of Gatik and why autonomous trucks?

**Gautam Narang** (1:39)
Let me start with just how I got in the field, right? So I grew up in Delhi, India, had an early start, so I started doing robotics.
This was before it was mainstream, so when I was in high school, so this was back in 2005, 2006 Initially, the kind of projects that I took on were very simple. Like we're talking about line following robots, obstacle avoidance robots, and then over the years, the complexity of the projects and the robotic systems that me and my brother took on increased, right? So back then, I was more focused on research. So one of the early projects that we took on was building India's first customized humanoid robot series.
And so this was like, you know, I'm talking about 2007, 2008 So before, humanoids were all the rage. So I was spending a lot of time doing research.
As part of that, I got a chance to travel the world. So, you know, spend some time in Japan, in Korea, you know, France and some of the other places, working at some of the top labs and companies. And the intention was to learn robotics, right? So, you know, that's where I spent the first few years in my research career. And then in early 2010s is when I transitioned to cell driving vehicles and mobile robotics. And the reason I did that was I felt those applications in the robotics space would be the first to be commercialized and scaled, right? I felt that humanoid robots, even though they were super cool, they are super cool. We were a bit too early in terms of commercialization. Yeah, I think we still are, but that's a different story. Transmission to self-driving vehicles, so I spent many years at Carnegie Mellon, initially as a researcher, then went back as a graduate student, studied robotics there, and then after graduation in 2017 is when I started Gatik, along with two other co-founders. And for me and the founding team, at that time, I'm sure you remember, there was a lot of, I would say, hype in the space, like, you know, the promises that many of the companies in our space were making, that this technology, this problem would be solved very broadly by 2019, 2020 That was the timeline that was originally being promised. And the thinking was, you know, we'll have tens of thousands of robot axis on the road around that timeline.
For me and the team, we felt that, you know, that was not the best way to go about commercializing this technology. So there were two criterias that we had in mind before starting Gatik. The first one was, we really wanted to obsess and focus on a customer pain point. So simply said, we did not want to develop technology for technology's sake. Rather, we wanted to identify a real customer pain point and develop technology and solution around that pain point. So even before we had incorporated the company, we were spending time with the customers, truly trying to understand what would be the right starting point within their ecosystem to deploy this technology. So that was the first criteria that we had in mind. The second one was, we did not want to boil the ocean. So we wanted to constrain the problem as much as we could, you know, deliver real value to the customers and scale in a relatively shorter time frame. So between these two criteria is how we landed on the middle mile segment of supply chain. So think of Gatik as automating regional logistics network for some of the largest retailers, grocers and CPG companies. And what we do for them is we help them move goods from their distribution centers or warehouses to other DCs or to a network of retail stores. So we automate their full regional logistics network using a driverless trucks. And by doing that, we enable high frequency of deliveries from the warehouses to the retail stores. Obviously addressing the huge driver shortage that the whole industry is experiencing. So that's the pain point that we're addressing. And then there's a lot of, you know, excitement in terms of what we can do with the technology and the value that we can unlock for the customers.