Travis Kalanick has launched a new company called Atoms that focuses on robotics

Uber founder Travis Kalanick has a new company called… Atoms It focuses on robots that, according to its website, will work in the food, mining and transportation industries.

Kalanick is transitioning his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It’s not immediately clear how he plans to handle mining and transportation. Atoms’ website says it will build a “wheelbase for robots,” Kalanick said in an interview Live interview with TBPN on Friday that his company would apply this wheelbase to “specialized robots” — not humans.

“Humanoid robots have their place, but there is a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient way at an industrial level, which is kind of where we play,” he said.

To support the mining business, Kalanick said on Friday that he is close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites created by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick revealed on Friday that he is already the “largest investor” in Pronto.

“The industrial thing is probably similar to our main jam,” Kalanick told TBPN. Kalanick objected to the idea of ​​using Atoms robots to transport people, at least in the near term. “Once you discover movement in the physical world, there are a lot of people who want to access that.”

Earlier on Friday Information Kalanick reported that Kalanick was returning to self-driving cars “with significant support” from Uber, and that he told people he “wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology from Waymo.” Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Atoms website does not mention Uber. The Information first reported that Kalanick was discussing an acquisition of Pronto.

Last year, Kalanick was said to be as well Interested in purchasing The US arm of Chinese self-driving car company Pony AI is backed by Uber, although The Information said on Friday that those talks had ended.

Kalanick He resigned from Uber In 2017 after a confluence of crises in the passenger transport company. At the time, the company was plagued by complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, prompting an external investigation that resulted in more than 20 cases. Fire employees.

Before that, Kalanick created a file Uber’s self-driving division in 2015. Levandowski played a large role in this project after Kalanick lured him away from Google. Eventually, Google sued Uber for stealing secrets related to its self-driving car project (which eventually became Waymo). The two companies settled down, but so did Levandowski Criminally charged and He was sentenced to 18 months in prison In prison for his role in the case. The engineer received a last-minute pardon from President Trump At the end of his first term.

The company continued work on the project after Kalanick’s resignation, including after one of its experimental vehicles resigned He struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018. Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, closed and The division was sold For independent trucking company Aurora in 2020.

In a Rare interview In March 2025, Kalanick expressed his regret that Uber was abandoning the development of its self-driving cars.

This story has been updated to reflect new information from the Atoms website and an interview with Kalanick.