Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, launched a new robotics company called Atoms on Friday, absorbing his ghost kitchen venture CloudKitchens into a broader enterprise focused on building specialized industrial robots for food, mining, and transportation. The announcement marks Kalanick’s most ambitious public move since his forced departure from Uber in 2017.
Kalanick revealed the company during a live interview on the tech talk show TBPN, describing Atoms as a venture that has been operating in stealth for eight years with “thousands” of employees. The company is a transformation of City Storage Systems, the parent company behind CloudKitchens, which previously raised funding at a reported $15 billion valuation in 2021.
Atoms Will Build Specialized Robots Across Three Industries
Rather than pursuing the humanoid robots that have captured headlines from companies like Tesla and Figure AI, Kalanick said Atoms will focus on purpose-built machines designed for specific industrial jobs. The company’s core technology is what it calls a “wheelbase for robots,” a standardized platform combining locomotion, power, computing, and safety systems into a rugged base that can accept task-specific payloads.
Atoms will operate across three divisions. Atoms Food will provide robotic infrastructure for food preparation and logistics, building on the automated kitchen technology CloudKitchens developed across hundreds of locations. Atoms Mining will deploy autonomous systems to increase productivity at mining sites. Atoms Transport will focus on last-mile cargo delivery and robotic logistics at depots and warehouses.
Kalanick Plans to Acquire Pronto From Former Uber Colleague
To anchor the mining division, Kalanick disclosed that Atoms is close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites. Pronto was founded by Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who became one of the most controversial figures in Silicon Valley after Uber hired him away from Google’s self-driving car program in 2017, sparking a trade secrets lawsuit. Kalanick said he is already Pronto’s largest investor.
Levandowski was convicted of stealing trade secrets from Google’s Waymo division, though he received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump in January 2021. Since then, he has rebuilt Pronto as an autonomous technology company focused on heavy industry rather than consumer vehicles.
The Manifesto and Kalanick’s Return to the Public Stage
Alongside the launch, Kalanick published a 1,600-word manifesto on the Atoms website, using pointed language to frame the company as a personal comeback. “I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena,” he wrote. The manifesto describes a mission to create “specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large.”
Kalanick’s departure from Uber came amid allegations of fostering a toxic workplace culture, multiple executive scandals, and a board revolt that forced him to resign. In the years since, he has largely avoided the public spotlight while building CloudKitchens, which leased commercial kitchen space to restaurants and delivery-only food brands. That business became one piece of a quieter second act that is now being repositioned as an industrial robotics play.
What This Signals for the Robotics Market
The launch arrives during a period of intense investment in robotics and AI-powered automation. Earlier this week, household robotics startup Sunday reached a $1.15 billion valuation, while Mind Robotics closed a $500 million Series A. Kalanick’s entry with an already operational company and thousands of employees positions Atoms as a potential major player, particularly in industrial segments where the economics of automation are most immediate.
Whether Kalanick can translate the operational intensity that built Uber into a successful robotics business remains an open question. But with a large existing workforce, proven infrastructure from CloudKitchens, and a pending acquisition that would bring autonomous driving technology in-house, Atoms is entering the market with more resources than most startups can claim at launch.
