Travis Kalanick unveils robotics startup Atoms

Uber founder Travis Kalanick has launched a new company called Atoms, which focuses on robotics and, according to its website, plans to operate across the food, mining, and transportation sectors.

Kalanick is folding his existing ghost kitchen business, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It is not yet clear how he intends to approach the mining and transportation categories. The Atoms website says the company will build a "wheelbase for robots," and Kalanick said in a live interview with TBPN on Friday that the company plans to apply that wheelbase to "specialised robots" rather than humanoid ones.

"Humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialised robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play," he said.

To support the mining side of the business, Kalanick said Friday that he is close to acquiring Pronto, the autonomous-vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining environments, founded by his former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick also said Friday that he is already the "largest investor" in Pronto.

"The industrial thing is sort of like, probably, our main jam," Kalanick told TBPN. He also downplayed the idea of using Atoms robots to move people, at least in the near term. "Once you crack movement in the physical world, there are lots of people who want access to that."

Earlier Friday, The Information reported that Kalanick was re-entering the self-driving vehicle space with "major backing" from Uber, and that he had reportedly told people he "wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo." Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Atoms' website does not mention Uber. The Information had also first reported that Kalanick was in talks to acquire Pronto.

Last year, Kalanick was also reportedly interested in acquiring the U.S. arm of the Chinese self-driving company Pony AI, with Uber's financial backing. However, The Information reported Friday that those discussions eventually fell apart.

Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 after a series of major crises hit the ride-hailing company. At the time, Uber was facing widespread complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, which led to an outside investigation and the firing of more than 20 employees.

Before that, Kalanick had launched a self-driving division at Uber in 2015. Levandowski played a major role in that effort after Kalanick recruited him away from Google. Google later sued Uber for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to its own self-driving car program, which eventually became Waymo. The companies ultimately settled the case, but Levandowski was criminally charged and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his involvement. He later received a last-minute pardon from President Trump at the end of Trump's first term.

Uber continued pursuing self-driving technology after Kalanick's departure, including after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018. Kalanick's successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, shut down and sold the division to autonomous trucking company Aurora in 2020.

In a rare interview in March 2025, Kalanick said he regretted that Uber had stopped developing its own self-driving cars.