Travis Kalanick built Uber from scratch, turned it into a company worth over $70 billion, and was then removed by his own board in 2017 after a wave of complaints about sexual harassment, discrimination, and a culture that had gone badly wrong. Most people assumed that was the end of the Kalanick story.
It was not. While staying almost entirely out of public view, he spent eight years building a holding company called City Storage Systems, with CloudKitchens, a network of shared commercial kitchens for delivery-only restaurants, as its main operation. Employees were reportedly told not to list the company name on LinkedIn. The whole thing ran across 30 countries without most of the industry knowing who was behind it.
This week, Kalanick revealed the next chapter. The company is now called Atoms, and it has just raised $1.7 billion led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and Uber also in the round. Ben Horowitz joins the board. The money will go toward expanding what is already a much larger operation than most people realised.
The most concrete part of the Atoms plan is Pronto, the autonomous vehicle company Kalanick acquired from his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Pronto makes self-driving systems for mining trucks and quarry vehicles. It is not building humanoid robots or science-fiction technology: it takes existing haulage trucks and makes them drive themselves around mine sites. Pronto already has commercial deals with Komatsu and Heidelberg Materials, and its systems have operated across North America, South America, and the Middle East.
Pronto's appeal is straightforward. Mining and quarrying sites are dangerous, expensive to staff, and geographically remote. A truck that drives itself around a copper mine does not need a shift change, does not get tired, and does not require housing in a camp. For operators in those industries, the economics are real today, not theoretical.
The CloudKitchens side of the business follows the same logic applied to food. Kalanick's description is blunt: do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. Build the real estate, run the software, use robotics to cut labour cost and improve consistency. CloudKitchens went through multiple rounds of layoffs in 2023 and 2024 and had legal and financial difficulties, but it gave Atoms eight years of operational data on how to run automated food production at scale.
Uber's participation in the round is the detail that most people will find surprising. The company fired Kalanick, bought out his shares, and watched him leave the board entirely by 2019. Now it is writing him a cheque. The reason is almost certainly self-interest: Uber missed earnings expectations in late 2025 partly because investors are worried that autonomous vehicles could erode its driver-based model. Having Atoms, and specifically Pronto's autonomous vehicle capability, in its orbit gives Uber a hedge.
For Andreessen Horowitz, the investment fits a clear pattern. The firm has been publicly and repeatedly backing what it calls physical AI: software and robotics applied to factories, mines, construction sites, and supply chains, rather than to screens and chatbots. This is one of their largest bets in that direction.
For business operators in industries that still run on human labour in physical environments, Atoms is worth watching for one simple reason. The money is now in place, the technology is commercially deployed, and the people behind it have already scaled one physical-world operation globally. Whether the full Atoms ambition holds together across food, mining, and transport is still an open question. But the pieces are no longer hypothetical.