Travis Kalanick's robotics company Atoms raises $1.7B, led by a16z

Travis Kalanick's robotics company Atoms has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Following the investment, Ben Horowitz will join the company's board. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and others also participated. Notably, Uber joined the round, reconnecting Kalanick with the company he founded — the same company that ousted him as CEO in 2017 after complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace.

Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company built atop the project Kalanick has been working on since leaving Uber, a ghost kitchen concept called Cloud Kitchens. When he revealed the new name in March, Kalanick announced he had acquired Pronto, the heavy industry automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick has also expressed interest in entering mining with Atoms, going beyond Pronto's existing work with vehicles in that industry.

Last year, reports emerged that Kalanick was interested in buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving company Pony AI with backing from Uber. In March, The Information reported that those talks had ended.

In a post on X about the fundraise, Kalanick did not go into specifics about his plans for Atoms. "On many levels, this round is 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," Kalanick wrote. "16 years ago, I started a journey to digitize the physical world. Understand, predict and control the physical world with software. Building 'atoms-based' computers where CPU is manufacturing, storage is real estate, and 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 on Wednesday. "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 focus on 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 specify details, but it appears a significant portion of the funding will go toward 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.