Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber, announced the raising of $1.7 billion in investment for his new startup Atoms, which specializes in industrial robotics and artificial intelligence.
Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber, announced the raising of $1.7 billion in investment for his new startup Atoms, which specializes in industrial robotics and artificial intelligence.
The entrepreneur reported this on his blog and X .
The round combined equity and debt financing. The lead investor was venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z); fund co-founder Ben Horowitz will join Atoms’ board of directors. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, Chemistry, A*, K5 Global, Abstract, SV Angel, Alpha Square Group — and Uber itself — also participated in the round. The debt portion of the deal was provided by five banks at once: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, and Barclays. The parties did not disclose the company’s valuation tied to this round.
It is symbolic that among the investors was Uber, the company from which Kalanick was forced to resign as CEO in 2017 amid allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic corporate culture.
Commenting on the deal, Kalanick called it a continuation of «unfinished business» — a reference to a nearly closed deal with a16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz back in 2011, while working at Uber. «In many ways, this funding round is a continuation of unfinished business. It gives us the opportunity to complete the story of the transition from ‘bits’ to ‘atoms’ that we started at Uber, developed at CloudKitchens, and are now implementing through Atoms,» he said.
Atoms is a rebranding of the holding company based on CloudKitchens, the «ghost» restaurant chain that Kalanick developed after Uber (the company was once valued at around $15 billion with the backing of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund). The company went public under the Atoms name in March 2026.
Atoms currently consists of three divisions: Atoms Food (which includes CloudKitchens, the Otter operating system, and Lab37 automated cooking technology), Atoms Mining (built around the March acquisition of Pronto, which is led by Kalanick’s former Uber colleague Anthony Lewandowski, known for his work in autonomous transportation), and Atoms Transport.
The company plans to use the raised capital to produce additional machines, expand commercial implementations, and simultaneously develop several automation systems for industrial enterprises. According to Kalanick, mining, construction, heavy transportation, and food production have significant potential for the implementation of such technologies: «Mining, construction, heavy transportation, and food production are just some of the sectors that work with physical objects and expect large-scale digital transformation. Industrial artificial intelligence will become the engine of the next industrial revolution,» the entrepreneur emphasized.
Commenting on the deal, Ben Horowitz noted that he believes the most valuable application of AI and robotics is to replicate what Uber did for transportation — to make everyone and everything more productive, now in the physical, not the digital, world.
