Travis Kalanick is launching a new company called Atoms that focuses on robotics

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

Kalanick is running his existing kitchen company, CloudKitchens, at Atoms. It is not clear how they plan to deal with mining and transportation. Atom’s website says it will create a “wheelbase for robots,” and Kalanick said in a live interview with TBPN Friday that his company will use this wheelbase for “special robots” — not humanoids.

“Humanoids have their place, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things properly, in an industrial way, which is how we play,” he said.

To support the mining industry, Kalanick said on Friday that he was on the verge of acquiring Pronto, the self-driving car company focused on industrial and mining operations created by former Uber partner Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick revealed on Friday that he is already the “highest investor” in Pronto.

“Industrial activities are like, probably, our biggest bottleneck,” Kalanick told TBPN. Kalanick has opposed the idea of ​​using Atom robots to move people, especially in the near future. “Once you mess up the material, there’s a lot of people who want to get that.”

Early Friday The Information He added that Kalanick is getting back into self-driving cars with “a lot of support” from Uber, and is said to have told people that he “wants to be more aggressive in introducing self-driving technology than Waymo.” Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Atoms website makes no mention of Uber. The Information first reported that Kalanick was in talks to acquire Pronto.

Last year, Kalanick was reported to be a shopaholic the US arm of Chinese self-driving company Pony AI with Uber, though The Information reported on Friday that the talks had ended.

Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 after experiencing problems with the snowboarding company. At the time, the company faced complaints of harassment and discrimination, which led to an external investigation that led to the departure of more than 20 people. workers are being laid off.

Before that, Kalanick created a the self-driving part of Uber in 2015. Levandowski played a major role in the project after Kalanick persuaded him to leave Google. Uber was eventually sued by Google for stealing privacy related to its self-driving service (which eventually became Waymo). The two companies settled, but Levandowski was the accused and was ordered 18 months in prison for his role in this matter. The scientist received a last-minute pardon from President Trump at the end of his first session.

The company continued to work on the project after Kalanick left, including after one of his test cars hit and killed a pedestrian in 2018. Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, closed with sold the share to the independent company Aurora in 2020.

In a a rare interview in March 2025, Kalanick complained that Uber had stopped developing its self-driving cars.

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