Is Travis Kalanick returning to the public stage?
Kalanick, founder of Uber Technologies Inc., has spent the last eight years quietly developing a new company. Now, it’s coming out of stealth.
Kalanick’s Atoms Inc. received a $1.7 billion investment in late July. The funding round includes heavy hitters. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, while Bain Capital, Fifth Wall Capital and even Uber – the company that ousted him in 2017 following reports of sexism and a toxic culture – participated in the round.
In a statement about Atoms’ future, Kalanick somewhat addressed the past.
“I had been torn away from an idea and a movement that I had poured my life into,” Kalanick wrote. “I had lost my bearings as I found the world increasingly operating by the rules of perception not reality.”
Downtown L.A.-based Atoms develops computers for the food, mining and transport sectors. The company is capitalizing on the hardware revolution that is injecting artificial intelligence, sensors and robotics into manufacturing, logistics and design. In L.A. alone, hard tech companies have raised more than $300 billion so far this year, more than the sector raised over the last nine years combined, according to PitchBook.
“At Atoms we make gainfully employed robots – specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large,” Kalanick said in a statement.
Taking the next steps
Founded in 2016, Atoms started out as CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen platform. Kalanick acquired a controlling stake in the startup’s parent company, City Storage Systems, in 2018 for roughly $150 million. He became chief executive.
CloudKitchens was seemingly a natural next step for Kalanick. Ghost kitchens were born out of food delivery platforms like Uber Eats, in which front-of-house operations became virtually extinct. The company raised $1.75 billion, according to PitchBook.
In March, Kalanick announced that he was renaming the company to Atoms and focusing more on industrial robotics during an interview with the Technology Business Programming Network podcast. However, until the July announcement, Kalanick had never shared exactly what his company did.
‘Bits-to-atoms’
About the latest funding, Kalanick said that “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.”
“Bits-to-atoms” is a common phrase in the Silicon Valley lexicon to describe the industry’s evolving preferences from billion-dollar software-as-a-service (bits) to hardware-focused industrial applications (atoms).
Uber and CloudKitchens were examples of building “atoms-based” computers to digitize the food industry, Kalanick said. With Atoms, he would build those computers for other sectors.
“Some companies are inevitable. The moment we invented the computer, it became inevitable that computers would take over the entire world of bits,” Ben Horowitz, who is joining Atoms’ board, posted on X. “Similarly, it is inevitable that within a generation, robots are going to do most of the menial work in the world of atoms: transforming atoms, moving atoms, and storing atoms are inevitably robot tasks.”
