Travis Kalanick is back, and Uber is helping to fund him. The founder Uber forced out in 2017 has raised $1.7 billion for Atoms, an industrial-AI and robotics company he has built in near-total stealth for years.
Andreessen Horowitz led the round. Its co-founder Ben Horowitz is joining the board. And among the investors sits Uber, the company Kalanick started in 2009 and left under a cloud.
That exit still shadows the story. Uber pushed Kalanick out as chief executive in 2017 after complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination and a toxic workplace. Nine years on, his old company is writing him a cheque. Kalanick, never one for understatement, calls the round “unfinished business”.
The equity comes with serious debt. Alongside a16z, Bain Capital, Fifth Wall and others, Atoms lined up credit facilities from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Barclays. The company did not disclose a valuation. That is the kind of firepower needed to build heavy machines, not apps.
Bits to atoms
Kalanick’s pitch is a single idea he has chased for 16 years: turning the physical world into something software can run. In his framing, manufacturing is the processor, real estate is the storage, and transport is the network. Uber digitised transport for the masses.
CloudKitchens, his ghost-kitchen venture, did the same for food. Atoms is meant to do it for whole industrial sectors. He calls the result an “atoms-based computer.”
The target is the unglamorous heart of the economy: mining, construction, heavy transport and food. His term for the toolkit is Industrial AI, a mix of software, sensors, robotics and models aimed at automating entire sectors. He calls the wider shift the “Age of Atoms.”
Not a humanoid in sight
Here Kalanick parts ways with much of the field. While rivals pour billions into general-purpose humanoid robots, Atoms builds specialised machines for specific jobs. Horowitz argues that purpose-built hardware copes with brutal industrial environments far better than a humanoid could. It is a pointed bet against the hottest trend in physical AI.
Atoms is split into three parts, according to reports. Atoms Food folds in CloudKitchens and its cooking and delivery software. Atoms Mining puts autonomous machines to work at extraction sites, built on Atoms’ acquisition of Pronto, a startup run by former Uber and Google engineer Anthony Levandowski.
Atoms Transport is what Kalanick calls a “wheelbase for robots.”
Levandowski’s presence adds intrigue. He sat at the centre of a self-driving trade-secrets case involving Google and Uber, and later received a presidential pardon. Kalanick has also flirted with buying the US arm of China’s Pony AI, with Uber’s help, though those talks ended earlier this year.
Comeback, with caveats
The mood around the deal is euphoric. One a16z partner called it the largest cheque the firm has ever written. Another investor predicted Atoms would be worth a trillion dollars within a decade. Horowitz put it more simply: “Travis is back.”
Some scepticism is warranted. Atoms has revealed a grand vision and a very large bank balance, but little in the way of deployed industrial robots at scale. The valuation is a mystery, the claims are sweeping, and Kalanick’s Uber record is not easily forgotten. Yet the bet is coherent.
He turned the movement of people into a software business once. Now, with $1.7 billion and his old adversary alongside him, he wants to do the same to the machines that grow, dig and haul the physical world.
