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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Middle mile

Gatik Raises $85M Series B, Brings Automated Middle Mile Delivery to Texas

Autonomous middle mile delivery company, Gatik, announced today that it has raised an $85 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, with participation from existing investors Innovation Endeavors, Wittington Ventures, FM Capital, Dynamo Ventures, Trucks VC among others. This brings the total amount raised by Gatik to $114.5 million

Despite its hum-drum name, the middle mile is far from middle of the road. In fact, the middle mile is perhaps one of the more exciting areas in autonomous vehicles right now. For those unfamiliar, the middle mile is the route between two business-to-business locations. Think: a retailers distribution warehouse to one of its store locations. Because the route is fixed, there are fewer variables a self-driving vehicle would encounter (same road, typically the same traffic conditions, etc.).

Because of these route limitations, it can be faster for a autonomous middle mile delivery company like Gatik to get to market. Local regulators don’t have to worry about self-driving cars learning and navigating complex situations and added safety concerns that come with delivering to a neighborhood house. Gatik now operates delivery routes in Toronto, Canada for Loblaws and for Walmart in Louisiana and Arkansas, where its middle mile route is fully driverless.

Along with today’s funding announcement, Gatik also said that it is expanding its operations into Dallas, Texas. Gautam Narang, Co-Founder and CEO of Gatik told me via video chat last week that as part of its move into Dallas, Gatik has signed undisclosed customers, which Gatik will be serving simultaneously, operating its trucks almost around the clock. “[We’ll be] moving goods for customer A during the day and customer B during the night,” Narang said.

The big funding and big move into Texas is the continuation of a big year for Gatik. So far this year the company has introduced an all-electric box truck, received $9 million (CAD) from the Canadian government to help winterize its technology, and partnered with Isuzu to develop autonomous medium-sized delivery trucks.

There isn’t a ton of competition right now in the autonomous middle mile space. Udelv unveiled its Transporter platform in April of this year. Unlike Gatik’s vehicles, which look like regular delivery trucks, Udelv’s Transporters are essentially giant pods, that don’t even have a place for a driver.

Between the investment and customers that Gatik is attracting, and the expanding willingness of local regulators to allow autonomous middle mile delivery, I suspect we’ll be seeing more players enter the space this year.

Udelv Launches New “Transporter” Delivery Vehicle, Will Use Mobileye’s Self-Driving Tech

Self-driving delivery startup Udelv announced today that it is launching a new “Transporter” vehicle that will use autonomous driving technology from Mobileye, an Intel company.

The new Transporter marks a couple of shifts for Udelv. First, the Transporter abandons the company’s traditional cargo delivery van form factor in favor of a more pod-like “skateboard” vehicle. The box shape is larger than the Nuro pod, and there is no longer space for a driver. Details such as range weren’t provided, but the Transporter is capable of traveling at 65 mph.

In addition to a new shape, Udelv is also shifting strategy by licensing out the self-driving technology from Mobileye. Up until this point, Udelv had been developing its own autonomous driving system. Mobileye Drive has EyeQTM SoC-based L4 compute, sensors and software and Mobileye’s Road Experience Management AV mapping solution. The Transporters will be capable of Level 4 self-driving, point-to-point operation. Udelv’s teleoperation system will allow the vehicles to be manually controlled for more complex situations such as parking lots, loading zones, apartment complexes and private roads.

One thing the new Transporters don’t have is temperature-controlled cargo bays. When asked about that during a live video press conference last week, Udelv Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Laury said that the company decided to forego refrigeration and temperature control to save on battery power. He also said that Udelv’s existing cargo bay setup provided ample temperature control for roughly an hour, even in the 110 degree weather of Phoenix, Arizona. He also said that frozen foods should be shipped with ice packs.

While the Transporter can do consumer deliveries, Udelv is focused on B2B deliveries, calling the middle mile low-hanging fruit. As we’ve seen with Gatik, limiting delivery routes to fixed, repeatable points (e.g., distribution warehouse to store location) avoids the complications that come with consumer deliveries. This in turn can make middle-mile delivery vehicles easier to pass muster with regulatory bodies and get on the roads faster.

Udelv and Mobileye plan to produce more than 35,000 Transporters by 2028, with commercial operations starting in 2023. The companies have their firs pre-order of 1,000 vehicles from Donlen, a U.S. commercial fleet leasing and management company.

Gatik’s Autonomous Middle-Mile Trucks to Go Full Driverless for Walmart

Self-driving delivery vehicles along the middle mile just got a little more autonomous. Walmart announced today that the Gatik self-driving delivery box trucks it uses on one Arkansas delivery route will remove the safety driver from the vehicle in 2021.

Gatik had quietly revealed plans for this driverless delivery last week. As Gatik explained then, one of the reasons it was able to go full driverless is because of the company’s focus on the middle mile. The middle mile is the business-to-business path when moving goods — between a warehouse and a store, for example. Because this route is clearly defined, fixed and repeatable, it decreases the number of variables a self-driving car will encounter. Gatik said this limited autonomous scope made it easier to gain regulatory approval necessary to for true humanless driving.

In addition to driverless deliveries in Arkansas, Walmart is expanding where and how it will use Gatik trucks. From the Walmart blog post:

We’ve tested multi-temperature Autonomous Box Trucks on a small scale in Bentonville and have learned how we might use autonomous vehicles to transfer customer orders from a dark store to a live store. Now, we’re expanding our pilot with Gatik to a second location to test an even longer delivery route and a second use case – delivering items from a Supercenter to a Walmart pickup point, a designated location where customers can conveniently pick up their orders. The Autonomous Box Trucks in Louisiana will initially operate with a safety driver.

The new route will be between New Orleans and Metairie, LA. But more interesting than the geography is the new use cases Walmart is outlining. By delivering to a pickup location, Walmart could provide a way for people who don’t live near a Walmart to shop at one. People in these more remote areas could order online and pick their items up closer to home. As Walmart describes, the use of autonomous trucks could essentially create a constant conveyor belt style loop of of deliveries from supercenters to pickup points throughout the day.

Autonomous delivery has been making some nice, errr, inroads this year. Back in February, Nuro got federal approval for its pod-like autonomous delivery vehicles to operate on public roads, and in April the company got approval to operate on California’s roads. In October the company announced that its vehicles had been running in three states with no drivers, no occupants and no chase cars.

In addition to its middle mile, Walmart is also testing out autonomous grocery delivery with cars from Cruise in Scottsdale Arizona.

Part of what’s spurring all this autonomous action is, of course, the COVID pandemic. Autonomous delivery helps reduce the amount of human-to-human contact when transferring goods, and as noted above, could be a means for operating a continuous supply chain so there are fewer product shortages.