Travis Kalanick emerges from 8-year stealth mode with Atoms, a robotics company betting against humanoids

Travis Kalanick launches a new company called Atoms focused on robotics | TechCrunch

Uber founder Travis Kalanick has a new company called Atoms focused on robotics that, according to its website, will operate in the food, mining, and transportation industries. Kalanick is rolling his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It's not immediately clear how he plans to tackle mining and transportation. Atoms' website says it will build a "wheelbase for robots," and Kalanick said in a live interview with TBPN on Friday that his company will apply this wheelbase to "specialized robots" -- not humanoids. "Humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play," he said. Earlier Friday The Information reported Kalanick was getting back into self-driving vehicles with "major backing" from Uber, and that he has reportedly told people he "wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo." Uber didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Atoms' website makes no mention of Uber. The Information also reported Kalanick is considering acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former colleague at the ride-hailing company, Anthony Levandowski. There is no mention of Pronto or Levandowski on Atoms' website. Last year, Kalanick was said to be interested in buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI with backing from Uber, though The Information said Friday that those talks ended. Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 after a confluence of crises at the ride-hail company. At the time, the company was plagued by complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, which sparked an external investigation that resulted in more than 20 employees being fired. Before that, Kalanick had created a self-driving division at Uber in 2015. Levandowski played a big role in that project after Kalanick lured him away from Google. Uber was ultimately sued by Google for stealing secrets related to its own self-driving car project (which eventually became Waymo). The two companies settled, but Levandowski was criminally charged and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in the affair. The engineer received a last-minute pardon from President Trump at the end of his first term. The company kept working on the project after Kalanick resigned, including after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018. Kalanick's successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, shuttered and sold the division to autonomous trucking company Aurora in 2020. In a rare interview in March 2025, Kalanick expressed regret that Uber had abandoned developing its own self-driving cars.

Uber co-founder Kalanick launches Atoms in specialized robotics push

March 13 (Reuters) - Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former chief executive of Uber (UBER.N), opens new tab, on Friday launched his startup, Atoms, focused on specialized industrial robotics designed to automate tasks in the mining, transport and food sectors. Kalanick is betting that task-specific machines are the key to improving industrial productivity. He is expanding and renaming City Storage Systems, the startup he started building after leaving the ride-hailing giant. "Gainfully employed ⁠robots are the machines best suited for the job at hand, that can make a living doing it," Kalanick said in a statement. Interest has been rising in specialized robots as they could offer a clear path to profitability, given the stress on automation across industries such as transport and waste management. General-purpose humanoid robotics faces challenges such as how to teach machines to navigate unpredictable environments and develop sophisticated ⁠reasoning abilities. Kalanick said Atoms will be organized into Atoms Food, providing infrastructure for the food industry, Atoms Mining, focusing on increasing mine productivity, and Atoms Transport, which he described as a "wheelbase for ⁠robots." He had resigned as CEO of Uber in 2017 due to pressure from investors, capping a tumultuous period for the ride-services company. In 2019, he left the company board. Kalanick wrote ⁠on the startup's website that he was "heartbroken" after he had left Uber and now he was back to ⁠his "calling" of building atoms-based computers, which are specialized systems using physical artificial intelligence to automate tasks in the real world. Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Uber founder Travis Kalanick launches robotics company Atoms

The Uber founder re-emerges with Atoms, a stealth robotics venture that quietly employed thousands before going public, and a philosophy about 'gainfully employed robots' that sounds a lot like Uber, but for warehouses. For eight years, Travis Kalanick ran a company whose thousands of employees were not allowed to list their employer publicly. On March 13, 2026, he was ready to stop hiding it. The company is called Atoms. It builds specialised industrial robots for food service, mining, and transport. And it has been doing so, quietly, since roughly 2017, long before the current wave of excitement about physical AI and humanoid machines. Atoms is the rebranded version of City Storage Systems, the holding company Kalanick founded after leaving Uber in 2017. Its most visible subsidiary, CloudKitchens, the ghost kitchen operator that signed leases on commercial cooking spaces and rented them to food delivery brands, is being folded into Atoms as the parent company shifts its emphasis from food infrastructure to robotics platform. Kalanick's core product thesis is what he calls a "wheelbase for robots": a standardised mobility platform consisting of a common chassis equipped with power, compute, and sensors, which can then be outfitted for specific industrial tasks. The analogy he draws is to the automotive industry, where a single platform underpins multiple vehicle variants. Atoms wants to do the same for task-specific wheeled machines. The pitch is deliberately anti-humanoid. While much of the robotics industry's current attention has coalesced around bipedal machines, Boston Dynamics, Figure, 1X, and others, Kalanick is betting on what he calls "gainfully employed robots": purpose-built, wheeled systems designed for high-cycle industrial environments where consistency and durability matter more than general dexterity. To extend that platform into mining and autonomous transport, Atoms is on the verge of acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup founded by Anthony Levandowski, the former Google and Uber engineer. Kalanick confirmed he is already Pronto's largest investor. The stealth period is the most striking element of the Atoms story. Ghost kitchens were a visible business, CloudKitchens' properties appeared in cities across the US and internationally, and the company raised substantial capital. But the parent entity and its broader robotics ambitions were systematically obscured from the public record, employees included. Kalanick has said little publicly about why. The most plausible explanation is competitive: a long development runway in a capital-intensive hardware sector requires protection from the attention of better-resourced rivals. Whether eight years of stealth have produced a product that can compete with the robotics programmes of Amazon, Tesla, and a dozen well-funded startups is what the next chapter of Atoms will have to prove. Kalanick knows how to build companies that move fast and get very large. He also knows, better than most, how quickly a founder's conviction about the future can collide with the present. Atoms is, at its core, a bet that the physical world is about to be digitised at industrial scale, and that the company best positioned to build the platform for that transition started quietly, in 2017, in a business that looked like kitchens.

Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick launches robotics venture Atoms - SiliconANGLE

Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick launches robotics venture Atoms Travis Kalanick, the billionaire co-founder of Uber Technologies Inc., today announced the launch of a new robotics startup. Atoms Inc. is built on the assets of a company called City Storage Systems Inc. that Kalanick founded in 2016. It will reportedly also absorb Pronto AI Inc., a venture-backed autonomous driving startup. The Information reported that Atoms is set to receive "major backing" from Uber. City Storage Systems has raised more than $1 billion in equity and debt financing. Its flagship asset is a company called CloudKitchens that operates dozens of ghost kitchens in the U.S. It leases those kitchens to restaurant operators, which use them to prepare takeout orders for customers. City Storage Systems also competes in the software market. It provides a suite of applications called Otter that restaurant operators can use to process online orders, run ads across delivery apps and perform various other tasks. The company offers the software alongside restaurant systems such as point-of-sale devices. Otter has been absorbed into Atoms alongside another City Storage Business unit called Lab37. The latter group is developing a 19-foot-long kitchen robot called the Bowl Builder. According to the company, it can automate up to 40% of the manual work involved in preparing orders. Atoms intends to develop technology for not only restaurants but also enterprises in the logistics and mining sectors. The company's plans in the latter two markets center on a startup called Pronto in which Kalanick is the biggest investor. The executive stated today that he is close to acquiring its remaining shares. Pronto's flagship product is an autonomous driving system built for haul trucks. Those are large, multimillion-dollar vehicles that mine operators use for material transport tasks. Haul trucks are sometimes also used in construction projects. Pronto's system provides so-called Level 4 autonomy, which means that it enables vehicles to operate without human guidance in a limited area. The device relies on a GPS module, cameras and radar sensors to navigate its environment. Its components are housed in a ruggedized case designed to withstand harsh conditions such as snow and wind. Workers can control trucks equipped with Pronto's system using a mobile app. In addition to setting a vehicle's travel designation, the app makes it possible to track operating metrics such as fuel use and payload weight.

Uber cofounder Kalanick launches Atoms in specialised robotics push - The Economic Times

Kalanick is betting that task-specific machines are the key to improving ⁠industrial productivity. ⁠He is expanding and renaming City Storage Systems, the startup he started building after leaving the ride-hailing giant.Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former chief executive of Uber, on Friday launched his startup, Atoms, focused on specialized industrial robotics designed to automate tasks in the mining, transport and food sectors. Kalanick is betting that task-specific machines are the key to improving ⁠industrial productivity. ⁠He is expanding and renaming City Storage Systems, the startup he started building after leaving the ride-hailing giant. "Gainfully employed robots are the machines best suited for the job at hand, that can make a living doing it," Kalanick said in a statement. Interest has been rising in specialized ⁠robots as they could offer a clear path to profitability, given the stress on automation across industries ⁠such as transport and waste management. General-purpose humanoid robotics faces challenges such as how to teach machines to navigate unpredictable environments and develop sophisticated reasoning abilities. Kalanick said Atoms will be organized into Atoms Food, providing infrastructure for the food industry, Atoms Mining, focusing on increasing mine productivity, and Atoms Transport, which he described as a "wheelbase for robots." He had resigned as CEO of Uber in 2017 due to pressure from investors, capping ⁠a tumultuous period for the ride-services company. In 2019, he left the company board. Kalanick wrote on the startup's website that he was "heartbroken" after he had left Uber and now he was back to his "calling" of building atoms-based computers, which are specialized systems using physical artificial intelligence to automate tasks in the real world.