Atoms, the robotics firm founded by Travis Kalanick, has secured $1.7 billion in new capital. Andreessen Horowitz led the investment round. Ben Horowitz will sit on the board. Bain Capital and Fifth Wall also took part.
Uber joined the funding. This links Kalanick back to the company he founded and later left as CEO in 2017 after allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace.
Atoms acts as a holding company for projects Kalanick has pursued since his departure from Uber, including Cloud Kitchens. In March, he announced the acquisition of Pronto, the heavy industry automation firm run by his former colleague Anthony Levandowski.
Kalanick has stated he intends to expand into mining with Atoms, moving beyond the vehicle automation Pronto currently handles. Reports from last year suggested interest in purchasing the US arm of Pony AI, backed by Uber, though those discussions ended in March.
Kalanick did not provide specific details on future projects in a post on X regarding the raise.
On many levels, this round is unfinished business. It provides fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens, and now finished at Atoms. Sixteen years ago, he began a journey to digitise the physical world. He aims to understand, predict, and control it with software. He describes building atoms-based computers where the CPU is manufacturing, storage is real estate, and the network is transportation.
Kalanick has said he wants to build a wheelbase for robots with Atoms.
Travis is Back, declared a simultaneous post from Ben Horowitz. It takes a rare kind of entrepreneur to change these old-school, heavy parts of our economy. They need a gritty work ethic, drive, and range that spans across domains, from software architecture to mechanical engineering. Travis is that guy, said Horowitz.
Horowitz wrote that Atoms will be all about making people more productive in the physical world.
I think the most valuable thing someone could do with AI and robotics is to repeat the same thing Uber did for transportation, or that computers did for the digital world: to make everything and everyone more productive, his post reads.
Kalanick did not go into specifics, but it sounds like a good chunk of funding will go towards hiring.
Changemakers, the builders of tomorrow’s progress machines, will inevitably go up against the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change. Nature is going to throw everything it has at the builders in this new industrial age and it’s going to take humanity’s strongest to stay the course and get these complex systems and industries over the finish line, he wrote.
What it means
The capital injection allows the team to expand staff and push forward with hardware development. The goal is to create reusable robot platforms that can handle tasks in heavy industry and mining, aiming to boost productivity in physical sectors similar to how software transformed digital work.
