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The Qatar Investment Authority has co-led a $200 million Series D funding round for Gatik, the autonomous trucking company announced on August 25, marking the latest in a series of deep tech investments by the sovereign wealth fund. The round, also co-led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, included participation from Millennium Management, ARK Invest, Intact Private Capital and other investors. Gatik said it will use the capital to scale its driverless freight operations from dozens of trucks today toward thousands in coming years across North American supply chains.
With more than $600 million in contracted revenue, the company has completed 85,000 fully driverless orders while maintaining 99 percent on-time delivery in its current networks spanning Texas, Arizona, Arkansas and Ontario, Canada. Gatik operates high-frequency routes between distribution centres and retail stores for major retailers, grocery chains and consumer goods companies. Abdulla Al-Kuwari, head of industrials at the authority, said in the statement that autonomous freight is transforming the global logistics industry by making it more efficient and reliable while the fund remains committed to backing providers shaping freight infrastructure.
A report published by Tech Funding News placed the Gatik transaction as the third such deal for the authority in the space of 10 weeks after it participated in two large European deep tech rounds during June. In the first of those, the authority backed ICEYE’s €450 million Series F funding that quadrupled the Finnish satellite firm’s valuation to €10 billion amid growing defence contracts and a €1.5 billion order backlog. The investment supports ICEYE’s expansion of its satellite constellation used for all-weather Earth observation and intelligence services.
Later that same month the authority joined an oversubscribed €380 million Series D for Nearfield Instruments, a Rotterdam semiconductor metrology company that reached a $1.6 billion valuation with the round. The funding enables the firm to accelerate development of inspection equipment critical for manufacturing advanced 3D chips central to artificial intelligence applications. Both transactions reflect the authority’s focus on hardware layers that underpin AI and physical infrastructure.
Tech Funding News reported that the pattern across the three investments in satellites, semiconductors and autonomous logistics aligns closely with Qatar’s National Vision 2030, the long-term strategy to diversify the economy beyond oil and gas. The authority, which oversees roughly $600 billion in assets under management, has emerged as one of the more active backers of European growth-stage deep technology companies. Its approach combines direct investments with engagement through venture networks to secure exposure to technologies with both commercial and strategic value.
Gatik was founded in 2017 by Gautam Narang, Arjun Narang and Apeksha Kumavat and has built a commercially focused autonomous system targeting middle-mile freight that avoids the complexity of fully unstructured urban delivery. The company has existing partnerships with Fortune 50 retailers and recently expanded its collaboration with PepsiCo for driverless operations in multiple US markets. This latest backing from the Qatar Investment Authority underscores growing sovereign interest in scaling proven autonomous systems that can deliver measurable efficiency gains to global supply chains.
