Uber founder Travis Kalanick has a new company called People is focused on robotics which, according to its website, will be active in the food, mining and transportation industries.
Kalanick is turning his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It’s not immediately clear how he plans to deal with mining and transportation. Atoms’ website says it will build a “wheelbase for robots,” and Kalanick told the live interview with TBPN on Friday that his company will apply that wheelbase to “specialized robots” — not humanoids.
“Humanoids have their place, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale way, which is kind of where we play,” he said.
To shore up the mining venture, Kalanick said Friday he was on the precipice of acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites created by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick revealed on Friday that he is already the “largest investor” in Pronto.
“The industrial thing is like our main jam,” Kalanick told TBPN. Kalanick balked at the idea of using robot Atoms to move people, at least in the short term. “Once you stop traffic in the physical world, there are a lot of people who want access to it.”
Early Friday The Information reported that Kalanick was getting back into self-driving vehicles with “significant support” from Uber and that he reportedly told people he “wants to be more aggressive in developing 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 initially reported that Kalanick was discussing acquiring Pronto.
Last year, Kalanick was said to be interested in buying the U.S. arm of Uber-backed Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI, though The Information reported on Friday that those talks have ended.
Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 after a series of crises at the ride-hail company. At the time, the company was plagued by allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination, which sparked an external investigation that resulted in the firing of more than 20 employees.
Before that, Kalanick had created a self-driving division at Uber in 2015. Levandowski played a big role in that project after Kalanick lured him away from Google. Uber was eventually sued by Google for stealing secrets related to its own self-driving project (which eventually became Waymo). The two companies settled, but Lewandowski was criminally charged and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in the case. The engineer received a last-minute pardon from President Trump at the end of his first term.
The company continued to work on the project after Kalanick stepped down, including after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018. Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, closed and sold the division to autonomous trucking company Aurora in 2020.
In a rare interview in March 2025, Kalanick expressed regret that Uber had given up on developing its own self-driving cars.
This story has been updated to reflect new information from the Atoms website and an interview with Kalanick.
