Travis Kalanick’s robotics company Atoms raises $1.7B led by Andreessen Horowitz

Travis Kalanick's robotics venture, Atoms, has closed a $1.7 billion funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, according to TechCrunch. The round also included participation from Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and notably Uber, the ride-hailing company Kalanick founded and was forced out of as CEO in 2017 following allegations of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct.

Atoms is essentially a rebranding of CloudKitchens, the ghost kitchen platform Kalanick has led since departing Uber. In March 2026, he announced the pivot and revealed that Atoms had acquired Pronto, a heavy industry automation company formerly run by Anthony Levandowski, Kalanick's former colleague at Uber.

Ben Horowitz, co-founder of the venture firm backing the round, will join Atoms' board. In a post on X, Horowitz framed the investment as an expansion of the productivity gains Uber achieved in transportation into the physical world. "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," he wrote.

Kalanick has described his vision for Atoms as building a "wheelbase for robots" and has signaled ambitions beyond Pronto's current work in vehicle automation for mining. A 2025 report from The Information indicated that talks between Kalanick and Uber to acquire the U.S. operations of Chinese autonomous vehicle company Pony AI had ended, leaving the scope of Atoms' robotics focus less defined.

In his own statement about the funding, Kalanick referenced what he called an "unfinished business" from Uber, describing Atoms as the completion of a "bits-to-atoms story arc." He elaborated on a longer-term thesis: "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."

The $1.7 billion valuation and investor roster suggest confidence in Kalanick's ability to build in robotics and automation, despite a decade of mixed results with CloudKitchens. The ghost kitchen venture struggled to achieve profitability and faced criticism over its unit economics and reliance on restaurant delivery platforms. Whether Atoms can succeed where CloudKitchens faltered remains an open question, particularly given the capital intensity of heavy industry robotics and the competitive landscape already occupied by established automation firms.