Gatik

Gautam Narang holds a master's in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and spent over a decade in robotics and AI research before Gatik, with stints at CNRS, Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center, Honda R&D, and Waseda University. Along the way he led teams building systems ranging from moon rovers and self-driving cars to off-road autonomous vehicles and bomb-disposal robots, and co-founded Maverick Robotics, where he was CEO. In 2017 he co-founded Gatik with his brother Arjun Narang and Apeksha Kumavat, betting that constrained, repeatable middle-mile routes — not robotaxis — were the fastest path to commercial autonomy. As CEO he has built Gatik into the market leader in autonomous B2B short-haul logistics, landing anchor customers like Walmart and Loblaw; in 2021 Gatik became the first company to run fully driverless commercial deliveries on the middle mile, on a Walmart route in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Arjun Narang earned a BE in electronics engineering from BITS Pilani and an MS in computer engineering (robotics and AI) from Purdue University, then built a research career across Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, Waseda University, and Carnegie Robotics, with expertise in perception, sensor-fusion-based SLAM, and probabilistic modeling. He also co-founded Maverick Robotics with his brother Gautam and served as computer vision and perception lead at robotics company OTSAW. In 2017 he co-founded Gatik with Gautam Narang and Apeksha Kumavat to bring autonomous trucking to middle-mile B2B logistics. As CTO he leads the company's technical organization; under his leadership Gatik became the first autonomous trucking company to remove the safety driver from a commercial delivery route (with Walmart in 2021) and launched driverless commercial operations in Canada with Loblaw in 2022. He was named a 2023 Automotive News Rising Star and a Business Insider Power Player.

Apeksha Kumavat began her career as an automation engineer at Siemens and a software engineer at AlgoAnalytics before earning a master's degree from Purdue University, where she now sits on the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering advisory board. Prior to Gatik she interned at CNH Industrial and served as computer vision lead for autonomous vehicle systems engineering at Ford Motor Company. In 2017 she co-founded Gatik with Gautam and Arjun Narang, taking the Chief Engineer role with responsibility for the company's proprietary autonomy stack — building and validating the safety-critical decision-making systems for Gatik's constrained middle-mile operational design domains. Her work underpinned Gatik's 2021 milestone as the first autonomous trucking company to operate fully driverless commercial deliveries, with Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas. She was named to the Inc. 2022 Female Founders 100 list and the 2022 Automotive News Rising Stars list.