Travis Kalanick launches a new company called Atoms focused on robotics

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

Kalanick is rolling his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms.

It’s not immediately clear how he plans to tackle mining and transportation.

Atoms’ website says it will build a “wheelbase for robots,” and Kalanick said in alive interview with TBPNon Friday that his company will apply this 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 kind of way, which is sort of where we play,” he said.

Earlier FridayThe Informationreported Kalanick was getting back into self-driving vehicles with “major backing” from Uber, and that he has reportedly told people he “wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo.” Uber didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Atoms’ website makes no mention of Uber.

The Information also reported Kalanick is considering acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former colleague at the ride-hailing company, Anthony Levandowski.

There is no mention of Pronto or Levandowski on Atoms’ website.

Last year, Kalanick was said to beinterested in buyingthe U.S.

arm of Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI with backing from Uber, though The Information said Friday that those talks ended.

Kalanickresigned from Uberin 2017 after a confluence of crises at the ride-hail company.

At the time, the company was plagued by complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, which sparked an external investigation that resulted in more than 20employees being fired.

Before that, Kalanick had created aself-driving division at Uberin 2015.

Levandowski played a big role in that project after Kalanick lured him away from Google.

Uber was ultimately sued by Google for stealing secrets related to its own self-driving car project (which eventually became Waymo).

The two companies settled, but Levandowski wascriminally chargedandsentenced to 18 monthsin prison for his role in the affair.

The engineer received a last-minute pardon from President Trumpat the end of his first term.

The company kept working on the project after Kalanick resigned, including after one of its test vehiclesstruck and killed a pedestrian in 2018.

Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, shuttered andsold the divisionto autonomous trucking company Aurora in 2020.

In arare interviewin March 2025, Kalanick expressed regret that Uber had abandoned developing its own self-driving cars.

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