Eight years in stealth, Atoms emerges as Kalanick's bet on specialised robotics
What's the deal? Travis KalanickDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the founder and former chief executive officer of Uber, has launched a new robotics venture called Atoms. The company aims to build a "wheelbase for robots" — a platform designed to power specialised industrial machines across food service, mining, and transportation.
Atoms is an expansion of CloudKitchens, formerly operating under the deliberately obscure name City Storage Systems. Kalanick chose the name to stay invisible after leaving Uber, barring employees from mentioning the company on LinkedIn. Eight years later, it operates across 30 countries with thousands of staff and a real estate portfolio spanning major cities worldwide — assets Kalanick describes as a structural moat few competitors could replicate.
The robotics division, Lab 37, is led by Eric MeyhoferDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, former head of Uber's advanced technology group, and is based in Pittsburgh. Atoms is also close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites founded by Anthony LevandowskiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → — Kalanick's former Uber colleague and already his largest single investment.
Why now? Kalanick argues the physical world is where the next wave of AI value will be created. His framework — treating manufacturing as CPU, real estate as storage, and transport as network — positions Atoms as infrastructure for what he calls the "digitisation of the physical world," a thesis he has held for over a decade. The timing also follows reports of major backing from Uber for a potential return to autonomous vehicles, though Atoms' website makes no mention of the company.
The reunion with Levandowski is striking. Both exited Uber under a cloud — Levandowski convicted of trade secret theft before receiving a presidential pardon from President Trump. Their collaboration signals Kalanick is willing to embrace controversy in pursuit of technical ambition.
What could go wrong? Atoms is entering three capital-intensive, heavily regulated industries simultaneously. Mining and transportation are dominated by incumbents with deep operational experience, and the breadth of the ambition raises real questions about focus. One sharp critique from industry observers notes that the vision — lights-out factories, autonomous freight, self-driving delivery — reads like a 2017 pitch deck, with Chinese companies already executing parts of it at scale.
The Pronto acquisition also carries baggage. Levandowski's history with Waymo and Uber is well documented, and any Atoms technology touching self-driving systems will attract legal and regulatory scrutiny.
The signal: Kalanick's strongest idea is also his simplest: specialised robots, purpose-built for industrial-scale tasks, will outperform humanoids in most commercial settings. The industry's current infatuation with humanoid designs, he argues, misses the point — a machine built to make a thousand pancakes an hour should not look like a person.
His physical AI tech stack — spanning sensors, compute, models, manufacturing, real estate, energy, and chemistry — is an honest acknowledgement of how hard the problem is, and how much cross-stack competence it requires. Whether Atoms can execute across all of it is the question. But the underlying conviction that physical automation is the next frontier is one the market is clearly beginning to share.
Sources:
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