Arjun Narang Recognized as a Business Insider Power Player 2022

following yearGatik’s Narang was recognized for leading the company’s engineering and R&D strategy, and overseeing the commercialization of Gatik’s fully driverless operations

Industry Recognition for Autonomous Engineering Leadership

Mountain View, California, 23 March 2022 – Gatik, the market leader in middle mile logistics, today announced that CTO and Co-founder Arjun Narang 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. These leaders redefine the sector, develop the next generation of autonomous technology, and build industry-changing companies.

Driving Fully Driverless Commercialization

Business Insider recognized Narang for his leadership role in the development, strategy, execution, and integration of Gatik’s commercial-grade technology for fully driverless medium-duty trucks. He established multi-year, industry-first technical partnerships. He doubled the size of Gatik’s world-class engineering team in the past 12 months. Gatik attributes its commercial success in the AV industry to its unique strategy. The company structured autonomy for fixed, repeatable middle-mile journeys. This approach leads to maximum safety.

A Learning-First Technical Architecture

Arjun Narang has successfully led a focussed engineering effort. He provided direction on unique technical solutions for unprecedented execution toward autonomy. He identified the right technical partners and built strong relationships. These efforts delivered industry-first commercial driverless middle-mile operations. They also enabled fast-paced growth of the company. The company’s proprietary autonomous technology uses a radically divergent hybrid approach toward system architecture, implementation, and validation of autonomous vehicles. It’s a learning-first approach. This approach allows Gatik to build rule-based fallback and validation systems around smaller sub-modules for maximum safety and efficiency. This approach enabled Gatik to remove the driver in Arkansas much more quickly than companies specializing in other applications. These applications include passenger transportation and last-mile deliveries. The company now delivers the true advantages of autonomous delivery today.

“It’s an honor to be recognized on this distinguished list by Business Insider,” said Arjun Narang, CTO and Co-founder, Gatik. “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.”

Background in Robotics and AI Research

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. Before joining Gatik, he led research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. There, he built robots and intelligent systems that are able to operate autonomously in complex and open-ended environments. Arjun has made critical research contributions in the field of autonomous systems at Waseda University (Japan), CUNY (USA), and Carnegie Robotics (USA). Arjun earned his M.S. (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.Business Insider judged each nominee based on experience, significance to their company, and contributions to the self-driving industry.

Business Insider chose selected individuals due to their role in defining the next generation of self-driving vehicles. These leaders launch the industry forward as it embarks on the next wave of development and deployment.

In 2022,  Forbes recognized Gatik as one of America’s Best Startup Employers and on Business Insider included the company on its rising stars of the self driving industry list. The Follwoing year, Forbesnamed Gatik to the 50 AI  list, while the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and  CES Honored it with an  Innovation Award . Earlier, in 2020, RBR50 honored Gatik with the Robotics innovation Award.