Uber founder Travis Kalanick has started a new company called Atoms that will focus on robotics and will operate in the food, mining and transportation industries, according to its website.
Kalanick is integrating his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It was not immediately clear how he plans to approach 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 the company would apply this wheelbase to “specialized robots,” not humanoid robots.
“Humanoids have their role, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, industrial-scale kind of way. That’s kind of our role,” he said.
Kalanick said Friday that he is on the brink of acquiring Pronto, a self-driving car startup focused on industrial and mining sites founded by former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, to support mining operations. Kalanick revealed Friday that he is already the “largest investor” in Pronto.
“Industrial stuff is probably kind of our main jam,” Kalanick told TBPN. Kalanick took issue with the idea of using Atoms robots to move people around, at least in the short term. “Once you decipher how the physical world works, there are a lot of people who want to access it.”
Early Friday morning, The Information reported that Kalanick was returning to self-driving cars with “massive support” from Uber and told people he wanted to be “more active in deploying self-driving technology than Waymo.” Uber did not respond to a request for comment. Atoms’ website makes no mention of Uber. The Information first reported that Kalanick was considering buying Pronto.
Last year, Kalanick was said to be interested in buying the U.S. division of Chinese self-driving car company Pony AI with backing from Uber, but on Friday The Information reported those talks had ended.
Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 following a combination of crises at the ride-hailing company. At the time, the company was plagued by complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, and an external investigation was launched that resulted in the firing of more than 20 employees.
Before that, Kalanick launched Uber’s self-driving division in 2015. Levandowski played a major role in the project after Kalanick poached him from Google. Uber was ultimately sued by Google for stealing secrets related to its self-driving car project, which later became Waymo. Although the two companies reached a settlement, Mr. Lewandowski was criminally charged for his role in the case and sentenced to 18 months in prison. The engineer received a last-minute pardon from President Trump at the end of his first term.
The company continued to work on the project after Mr. Kalanick resigned, and was affected by the fallout in 2018 after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian. Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, shut down the division in 2020 and sold it to self-driving truck company Aurora.
In a rare interview in March 2025, Kalanick expressed regret that Uber had given up on developing its own self-driving cars.
This article has been updated to reflect new information from the Atoms website and an interview with Kalanick.
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