Atoms hires former Uber CFO Gautam Gupta as finance chief
Travis Kalanick's robotics startup Atoms has appointed Gautam Gupta, Uber's former finance chief, as its new CFO, weeks after raising $1.7 billion. Gupta previously served at Uber for over four years and left in 2017.
Atoms, the robotics and industrial AI company founded by Travis Kalanick, has brought on another former Uber executive. Gautam Gupta announced Wednesday on social media that he has joined as chief financial officer. The appointment comes shortly after Atoms announced a $1.7 billion funding round last month.
Gupta spent more than four years at Uber, serving as finance chief under Kalanick. He left the company in July 2017, a few weeks after Kalanick resigned as CEO; Gupta had said in May of that year he planned to depart. His move to Atoms continues a pattern of Kalanick reassembling former Uber colleagues. Earlier this year, Atoms acquired Pronto, a mining autonomy startup run by former Uber and Google self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski. LinkedIn shows several former top Uber employees who worked with Kalanick are now at Atoms, which previously operated under the name CloudKitchens.
When announcing the $1.7 billion raise last month, Kalanick described the round as "a bit of unfinished business," saying it would help complete the "bits-to-atoms story arc" started at Uber and continued at CloudKitchens. Uber itself participated in the funding round, despite having pushed Kalanick out in 2017 amid scandals. Uber did not disclose its contribution, but The Information reported it was $100 million, a figure TechCrunch confirmed.
Gupta has a long history with Kalanick. He invested in Uber in 2012 while a Goldman Sachs vice president and joined the company in 2013. In his Wednesday post, he said he joined Uber because he believed Kalanick had "a magical mix of genius and intensity." Gupta wrote that A*, the venture capital firm he co-founded in 2020, made its largest-ever fund investment in Atoms. According to his LinkedIn, Gupta is stepping down from A* to take the CFO role.
