Travis Kalanick’s robotics company Atoms has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz will join the company’s board following the investment.
Bain Capital, Fifth Wall and others participated in the round.
Perhaps most notably, Uber also joined the funding round, reconnecting Kalanick with the company he founded — and the same company that ousted him as CEO in 2017 after allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and a toxic workplace.
Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created on top of the project Kalanick has been working on since leaving Uber, a ghost kitchen game called Cloud Kitchens. When he unveiled the new name in March, Kalanick announced he had acquired Pronto, the heavy industry automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski.
Kalanick also said he wants to get into mining with people, going beyond what Pronto already does for vehicles in that industry. Last year, Kalanick was reported to be interested in buying the US arm of Uber-backed Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI. The Information reported in March that those talks had ended.
In one position at X on fundraising, Kalanick didn’t go into detail about what he wants to build with Atoms.
“On many levels, this round is a bit of a work in progress. Fueling the completion of the bit-to-atoms story we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens, and will now finish at Atoms,” Kalanick wrote. “16 years ago, I started a journey to digitize the physical world. Understand, predict and control the physical world with software. Building ‘people-based’ computers where the CPU is built, the storage is the real estate, and the network is the transport.”
Kalanick has said he wants to create a “wheelbase for robots” with the Atoms.
“Travis is coming back,” he announced at the same time position by Ben Horowitz on Wednesday. “It takes a rare breed of entrepreneur to change these old, stodgy parts of our economy. It takes a gritty work ethic, drive and breadth that spans all fields, from software architecture to mechanical engineering. Travis is that guy,” Horowitz said.
Horowitz wrote that Atoms will aim to make people more productive in the physical world.
“I think the most valuable thing that AI and robotics could do is replicate the same thing that Uber did for transportation or that computers did for the digital world: make everything and everyone more productive“, his post states.
Kalanick didn’t go into specifics, but it appears a good portion of the funding will go toward hiring.
“Changes, the builders of tomorrow’s engines of progress, will inevitably come up against the last boss, Nature and her fierce resistance to change. Nature will throw everything she has at the builders of this new industrial age, and it will take the strength of humanity to stay the course and get these complex systems and industries over the finish line,” he wrote.
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