Uber and a16z back Kalanick's $1.7bn robotics firm Atoms

Travis Kalanick’s newly rebranded robotics company, Atoms, has closed a $1.7 billion funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The round also drew participation from Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and notably, Uber. Ben Horowitz will join the board of the company, which is built on the foundation of Kalanick’s previous ghost kitchen venture, Cloud Kitchens.

Atoms marks Kalanick’s pivot away from food delivery infrastructure and toward heavy industrial automation. The holding company recently acquired Pronto, a heavy industry automation firm run by Kalanick’s former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick has stated his intention to expand into mining and build a “wheelbase for robots,” aiming to digitize and control the physical world with software.

For European manufacturers and logistics operators, the capital scale of this venture underscores the intensifying race to modernize heavy industry. Ben Horowitz explicitly framed the mission as targeting the “old-school, heavy parts of our economy,” aiming to use AI and robotics to make everything more productive. By applying these platform economics to mechanical engineering, Atoms signals a well-funded threat to legacy industrial players globally.

Uber’s decision to invest reconnects Kalanick with the company he founded before his 2017 ouster following workplace misconduct complaints. It also reflects a broader trend of platform companies seeking stakes in the next layer of physical infrastructure. Last year, Kalanick reportedly explored buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving firm Pony AI with Uber’s backing, though those talks ended in March.

Despite the massive capital injection, Kalanick remained vague on specific product roadmaps in a post on X. He described the raise as “unfinished business” to complete a “bits-to-atoms story arc,” comparing his vision to a computer where “CPU is manufacturing, storage is real estate, and network is transportation.” He suggested the funding will largely go toward hiring engineers capable of overcoming complex physical challenges in what he called a “new industrial age.”