Travis Kalanick's robotics firm Atoms raises $1.7B

Atoms, the robotics company run by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz set to join the company’s board. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and other investors also participated — alongside Uber itself, reconnecting Kalanick with the company he founded and that pushed him out as CEO in 2017 following complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace.

Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company built on top of Cloud Kitchens, the ghost-kitchen business Kalanick has run since resigning from Uber. He unveiled the Atoms name in March, alongside the acquisition of Pronto, a heavy-industry automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick has also said he wants to expand into mining, building on what Pronto already does for vehicles in that industry. Last year, it was reported that he was interested in buying the US arm of Chinese self-driving company Pony AI with Uber’s backing, but The Information reported in March that those talks had ended.

In a post on X about the raise, Kalanick didn’t detail his plans for Atoms but described the round as “a bit of unfinished business.” “Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens and will now finish at Atoms,” he wrote, adding that he wants to build a “wheelbase for robots.” He linked the funding to a 16-year throughline dating to his early ambition of digitizing the physical world, casting Atoms as building computing infrastructure for the physical world — where manufacturing serves as processing power, real estate as storage, and transportation as the network. Ben Horowitz, who framed the investment as a bet on Kalanick’s range “from software architecture to mechanical engineering,” said the goal is to replicate what Uber did for transportation — and what computers did for the digital world — for the physical world, making people more productive.

Kalanick offered no specifics on how the money will be spent, though the tenor of his post suggests hiring will take up a large share of it. He cast Atoms’s mission in sweeping terms, describing the builders of new physical-world technology as facing fierce resistance from nature itself, and said it will take humanity’s most driven people to see these complex industrial systems through.

Why it matters

Kalanick’s return with big-name backers — including Uber itself — signals renewed venture appetite for hardware-heavy bets on robotics and industrial automation, even as questions remain about what Atoms will actually build.