Uber Just Invested in Travis Kalanick's New Robotics Company, Years After Pushing Him Out

Travis Kalanick is back in business with the company that pushed him out.

Atoms, Kalanick's robotics venture, has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, according to TechCrunch. Ben Horowitz will join Atoms' board following the investment. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and others also participated.

So did Uber. The ride-hailing company Kalanick co-founded and led until its board pushed him out as CEO in 2017 — following complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace — is now an investor in his next venture.

What Atoms Actually Is

Atoms is a rebranded holding company built on top of CloudKitchens, the ghost-kitchen business Kalanick started after leaving Uber, according to TechCrunch. When Kalanick revealed the Atoms name in March, he also announced he'd acquired Pronto, a heavy-industry automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Levandowski is now building heavy-industry automation technology alongside Kalanick again.

Kalanick has said he wants to push into mining automation, going beyond what Pronto already does for vehicles in that industry, per TechCrunch. He was also reportedly interested last year in buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving company Pony AI with backing from Uber, though The Information reported those talks had ended by March.

The Pitch: Vague, But Big

Kalanick didn't offer many specifics about what Atoms will actually build. In a post on X announcing the raise, he described it as unfinished business.

"Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens and will now finish at Atoms," Kalanick wrote. "16 years ago, I started a journey to digitize the physical world. Understand, predict and control the physical world with software."

He's talked about building a "wheelbase for robots" with Atoms. Beyond that, the specifics are thin. Kalanick didn't detail where the money will go, though TechCrunch reported it sounds like a good chunk of the funding will go toward hiring.

Ben Horowitz, meanwhile, posted his own announcement the same day: "Travis Is Back." He called Kalanick a rare entrepreneur capable of changing "old-school, heavy parts of our economy," citing a work ethic, drive, and range spanning from software architecture to mechanical engineering.

Horowitz framed the company's ambition in sweeping terms, writing that the most valuable thing someone could do with AI and robotics is repeat what Uber did for transportation, or what computers did for the digital world — making everything and everyone more productive.

The Fair Read and the Skeptical Read

There's a legitimate case for backing Kalanick. He built Uber into a major ride-hailing business, and CloudKitchens has quietly become a real operation in the ghost-kitchen space. Investors betting on operational grit and a track record of scaling unglamorous, capital-intensive logistics businesses aren't being irrational. Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital, and Fifth Wall are sophisticated investors putting up real money, not doing this as a favor.

The skeptical read is that a $1.7 billion round with barely any public detail about the product is a lot of faith placed in reputation and charisma over a concrete plan. Kalanick's own exit from Uber wasn't a disagreement over strategy — it followed complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a workplace culture described as toxic.

Uber's decision to invest in Atoms doesn't erase that history, and nothing in the current reporting suggests Uber's current leadership sees any conflict in doing business with its former CEO. Uber has not issued a separate statement explaining its rationale for joining the round beyond participating as one of several investors.

What's Next

Atoms hasn't detailed a product roadmap, a timeline, or specific mining or robotics contracts. Whether the wheelbase-for-robots idea, the mining ambitions, or something else entirely becomes the company's actual business is still an open question. The next real test will be what Atoms ships, and whether Kalanick's next act in heavy industry looks anything like the vague, sweeping language in his fundraising post.