Gatik driverless trucks Walmart PepsiCo Series D Gatik, the autonomous middle-mile logistics company, raised $200 million in a Series D round, the largest funding announcement in the company’s seven-year history, as it expands driverless trucks for Walmart, PepsiCo, and a growing roster of Fortune 50 retailers. The Santa Clara, California-based company said the round was led by the Qatar Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund with roughly $524 billion in assets under management.
Existing and new institutional backers joined the financing, including Koch Disruptive Technologies, Millennium Management, ARK Invest, Intact Private Capital, and Arca Continental. Intact Private Capital tripled its prior commitment, according to Gatik. The company said total capital raised now stands at approximately $500 million since it emerged from stealth in 2019.
The new capital arrives as Gatik deepens what its executives describe as the largest commercial autonomous freight deployment on record: a multi-year strategic agreement with PepsiCo. Forty-one driverless Gatik trucks now move Frito-Lay products — including Cheetos and Doritos — between distribution centers and stores, reaching roughly 250 retail locations across Dallas, Phoenix, and Northwest Arkansas.
Gatik driverless trucks Walmart PepsiCo Series D: Middle-mile autonomy takes a different path
While rivals chase coast-to-coast robotaxi services and billion-dollar bets on long-haul highway trucking, Gatik has focused on a narrower commercial problem: repetitive, short-haul trips between distribution centers and retail stores. Its fleet of Isuzu-manufactured box trucks operates without a safety driver, on fixed routes the company has mapped extensively, in Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, and Ontario, Canada.
Gatik reported more than 85,000 fully driverless commercial orders completed at a 99% on-time delivery rate. The company said it has locked in more than $600 million in contracted revenue over the agreement periods. Pepin’s rival autonomous trucking company emphasized last year that regulators have been watching such deployments closely before allowing expansion to new routes, a hurdle Gatik says it has cleared with state-level permits.
PepsiCo senior vice president of supply chain Jim Farrell said the company needed a logistics network that could respond to volatile consumer demand without scaling headcount proportionally. “We needed a supply chain that could flex with shifting order patterns, and Gatik’s middle-mile approach gave us predictable capacity on routes we’d been running for decades,” Farrell said.
Walmart, Loblaw, and the origin of the model
Gatik’s first publicly named customer was Walmart, a partnership that began in 2019. In August 2021, the two companies said they had executed what they characterized as the world’s first removal of a safety driver from a commercial middle-mile delivery route. The deployment has since multiplied across additional lanes and stores.
Canada’s largest retailer followed with an even larger commitment. In September 2025, Gatik and Loblaw Companies signed a five-year agreement covering an initial deployment of 50 autonomous trucks across the grocer’s Greater Toronto Area distribution network. Other named customers include Tyson Foods and Kroger.
Chief executive Gautam Narang said the new funding would underwrite fleet expansion, safety case development for additional U.S. states, and hiring across engineering, operations, and government affairs. “The model is no longer a pilot,” Narang said in remarks accompanying the raise. “We are operating a paid freight network with a safety record that’s been independently audited, and institutional investors have done the underwriting to confirm it.”
Sovereign capital and a proving market segment
The Qatar Investment Authority’s lead role underscored the geographic diversification of autonomous-freight capital, which has historically concentrated in Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh. Sovereign and crossover investors have shown increasing appetite for autonomy businesses that can demonstrate unit economics rather than only demo videos.
Gatik’s commercial results, if sustained, position it as a proof point for middle-mile autonomy as a category distinct from last-mile delivery robots and Class 8 highway trucking. The company’s trucks do not operate on interstates; they run between fixed facilities on routes often under 100 miles in each direction, with turnarounds measured in hours rather than days.
Analysts have noted that the segment is dominated by a handful of players, including Gatik, and that contract revenue rather than press releases has emerged as the principal yardstick for institutional investors. The PepsiCo commitment in particular has been cited as evidence that a branded shipper is willing to underwrite a long-term autonomous freight relationship at scale.
For Walmart, the supplier relationship that began as a 2019 pilot is now embedded into daily store replenishment in several U.S. states. For PepsiCo, the volume of autonomous miles running today makes the snack-food giant an early case study in outsourced driverless middle-mile logistics. The competitors that raised larger sums but pursued highway robotrucks have faced longer timelines, more regulatory friction, and a thinner commercial order book.
The Series D, the company’s largest, positions Gatik to add corridors, deepen its safety case with U.S. state regulators, and push toward the next commercial milestones — including international expansion from its Ontario beachhead. Whether middle-mile autonomy becomes a durable category will depend on whether the economics that worked for Walmart, PepsiCo, and Loblaw translate to additional Fortune 500 shippers over the next two years. The Gatik driverless trucks Walmart PepsiCo Series D round is now the clearest market signal yet that the bet is moving from demonstration to scaled deployment.
Source: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/325675/20260826/driverless-trucks-now-run-walmart-pepsico-routes-gatik-raises-200m-scale.htm