Arjun Narang Recognized as a Business Insider Power Player 2022

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

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 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, industry-first 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 unique strategy to approach the target market by structuring autonomy for fixed, repeatable middle-mile journeys leading to maximum safety.

Arjun Narang has successfully led a focussed engineering effort, providing direction on the unique technical solutions for an unprecedented execution towards autonomy, identifying the right technical partners and building strong relationships to deliver on the industry-first commercial driverless middle-mile operations and enable fast-paced growth of the company. The company’s proprietary autonomous technology involves a radically divergent hybrid approach towards the system architecture, implementation & validation of autonomous vehicles. It’s a learning-first approach, but one which allows Gatik to build rule-based fallback & validation systems around smaller sub-modules for maximum safety and efficiency. This approach enabled Gatik to successfully remove the driver in Arkansas much more quickly than companies specializing in other applications (i.e., passenger transportation and last-mile deliveries) and deliver 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.”

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. 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. 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.

In 2022, Gatik was recognized by Forbes as one of America’s Best Startup Employers and on Business Insider’s Rising Stars of the Self-Driving Industry list. In 2021, Gatik was recognized on the Forbes AI 50 list, as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and as a CES Innovation Award Honoree. In 2020, Gatik was recognized with the RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award.