Travis Kalanick’s robotics company raises $1.7 billion, led by a16z

Robotics company Atoms, owned by Travis Kalanick, has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz will join the company’s board of directors following the investment.

Bain Capital, Fifth Wall and others participated in the round.

Perhaps most notably, Uber also joined the funding round, reconnecting Kalanick with the company he founded — the same company that fired him as CEO in 2017 after complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace.

Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created on top of a project Kalanick has been working on since resigning from Uber, a ghost kitchen play called Cloud Kitchens. When he revealed the new name in March, Kalanick announced that he had acquired Pronto, the heavy industry automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski.

In a mail At X In terms of fundraising, Kalanick didn’t go into detail about what he wants to build with Atoms.

“On many levels, this tour is somewhat unfinished business. Fuel to complete the ‘bits to atoms’ story that we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens and will now finish at Atoms,” Kalanick wrote. “16 years ago, I began a journey to digitize the physical world. Understand, predict, and control the physical world using software. Build ‘atom-based’ computers where the CPU is fabricated, storage is real estate, and the network is transportation.”

Kalanick said he wants to build a “robot wheelbase” using Atoms.

“Travis is back,” announced a concurrent post from Ben Horowitz on Wednesday. “It takes a rare kind of entrepreneur to change these heavy-handed parts of our old-school economy,” Horowitz said. “They need a bold work ethic, drive, and a range that spans across fields, from software engineering to mechanical engineering. Travis is that guy.”

This story develops…