Uber founder Travis Kalanick has launched a new robotics company called Atoms, which will operate in food, mining, and transportation by building a specialized "wheelbase for robots." The company is incorporating his existing ghost kitchen business, CloudKitchens, and reports indicate Kalanick is seeking to aggressively re-enter the self-driving vehicle sector, potentially with backing from Uber and through the acquisition of startups like Pronto.
The main topics covered are the launch and focus of Atoms, Kalanick's renewed ambitions in autonomous vehicles, and the historical context of his prior work and controversies at Uber, including the company's past self-driving efforts and legal issues.
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.
Meridiano
