Gatik Partners with Canada’s Largest Retailer, Loblaw and Raises Series A Funding Round
By: Gautam Narang
Tags: Autonomous Vehicles, Supply Chain, Autonomy

Gatik was founded in 2017 with one mission — to deliver goods safely and efficiently using autonomous vehicles.

This week we announced our Series A funding round of $25 million, and expansion of operations into Canada with the country’s largest retailer, Loblaw. The funding will enable us to further expand our operations across the continent, as well as increase our team size in Silicon Valley and growing presence in Canada.

The round was co-led by Wittington Ventures and Innovation Endeavors with participation from FM Capital and Intact Ventures. Existing investors Dynamo Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, AngelPad and others also invested in this round. Our investors bring a wealth of deep experience in automotive, artificial intelligence and supply chain, making them a strong strategic fit for Gatik’s rapid growth. We’re always proud to break new ground, and our partnership with Loblaw is another milestone for the industry — the deployment marks Canada’s first ever autonomous delivery fleet. We’ll be providing Loblaw with a safe, reliable, contactless delivery solution for transporting multi-temperature goods from its automated picking facility to retail locations across the country’s most populous city, Toronto. We’ll be operating 5 vehicles for Loblaw on 5 brand new routes, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.

Retailers know the biggest inefficiencies in their logistics operations often exist in the middle-mile, typically between micro-fulfilment centres (MFCs) and retail locations. This is where Gatik lives and succeeds, and is the reason we’re able to offer immediate value to our customers. The middle mile is the most underserved and costly segment of the supply chain, and ensuring its efficiency has become absolutely critical for retailers who want to keep up with demanding consumer behavior. The pandemic has only served to amplify supply chain challenges. As such, enhancing middle mile delivery has become indispensable — for our part, we’ve seen a 30–35% spike in orders since the onset of COVID-19. By automating this segment of the supply chain, we’re able to reduce costs, keep delivery times short and address an unprecedented need for contactless delivery.

A lot has happened for us this year. In May 2020, we announced our new platform: we now have a fleet of multi-temperature Autonomous Box Trucks ranging in size between 10 and 26 feet in length, all capable of storing ambient, cold and frozen goods. June 2020 marked our one year anniversary of delivering autonomous orders with our first customer, Walmart, in the USA. We’re now working with multiple Fortune 500 customers across the USA and Canada, and travelling up to 300 miles on a single journey. I’ll share more announcements in the coming weeks — this post marks the first in our new monthly series.

It’s a time for us to grow, and grow fast. In the last 12 months we’ve doubled our team size, and will double again in the next 12 months. We went into the year with strong momentum from early customer partnerships and validation of our technology. We’re very proud of how we’ve supported our customers throughout this unpredictable year, and strengthened their supply chains with our product. Whereas the last decade was heavily focused on warehouse automation, as far as retailers are concerned, the focus this decade will be making their on-road transportation networks autonomous.