Arjun is the co-founder and CTO at Gatik, a Palo Alto-based startup developing autonomous light/medium trucks and vans for B2B short-haul logistics. Gatik’s autonomous vehicles have been operating on public roads across North America since 2019 with multiple Fortune 500 retail partners including Walmart. These partnerships are a first in the AV industry: this kind of middle-mile integration with major retailers has never been done before, marking the first-ever deployment of a hub-and-spoke AV delivery model, and is proof of commercialization and scalability for their use case and market. Arjun has 10+ years of experience working in the robotics space with expertise in perception, sensor fusion based SLAM, probabilistic modeling and multi-task learning.

As a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, he built robots and intelligent systems that are able to autonomously operate in complex and open-ended environments. Before founding Gatik, Arjun was the Head of Perception at Otsaw Digital, where he conceptualized and led a multi-disciplinary team of engineers for development of hardware, firmware, software, backend, on-device and in-cloud algorithms for outdoor autonomous navigation of the O-R3 patrolling robot. He has made critical research contributions in the field of autonomous systems at Waseda University (Japan), CUNY (USA), Infratek Solutions (USA) and Carnegie Robotics (USA). He has contributed to several research papers on self-driving and robotics technology. Arjun earned his M.S. (Focus on Robotics and AI) from Purdue University and B.S. from BITS Pilani, India.