Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Emerges From Eight Years of Stealth to Launch Atoms, a Robotics Company Betting Against Humanoids
Kalanick rebrands City Storage Systems as Atoms, absorbing CloudKitchens and acquiring autonomous-driving startup Pronto to build purpose-built industrial robots.
Overview
Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, has unveiled a robotics company called Atoms after operating in near-total secrecy for roughly eight years. Announced on March 13, the venture absorbs Kalanick’s ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens and is acquiring Pronto, an autonomous-driving startup founded by former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, according to TechCrunch and Fortune.
The company is a deliberate counterpoint to the humanoid-robot wave sweeping the industry. Kalanick is betting instead on what he calls “gainfully employed robots” — purpose-built, wheeled machines designed for high-cycle industrial work in food service, mining, and transportation.
What We Know
Atoms is the rebranded form of City Storage Systems, the holding company Kalanick founded in 2016 after his departure from Uber. During its stealth period, employees were reportedly barred from listing the company on their LinkedIn profiles, and the company quietly employed thousands under the deliberately nondescript name, as reported by Fortune.
Kalanick explained the reasoning behind the secrecy: “You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous,” he told Fortune.
The company’s core technological proposition is what Kalanick calls a “wheelbase for robots” — a standardized mobility platform consisting of a common chassis equipped with power, compute, and sensors that can be configured for specific industrial tasks, according to The Next Web. The analogy he draws is to the automotive industry, where a single platform underpins multiple vehicle variants.
Atoms comprises several business units, as detailed by SiliconANGLE:
- CloudKitchens: Ghost kitchen operations that lease commercial kitchen space to restaurant operators for takeout preparation.
- Otter: A software suite for restaurants enabling order processing, delivery-app advertising, and point-of-sale integration.
- Lab37: A division developing the “Bowl Builder,” a 19-foot kitchen robot that automates up to 40 percent of manual food-preparation work.
- Pronto AI: An autonomous driving system for haul trucks used in mining and construction, offering Level 4 autonomy using GPS, cameras, and radar sensors.
City Storage Systems raised over one billion dollars in equity and debt financing during its stealth years, according to SiliconANGLE. Uber is also reportedly providing major financial backing for the newly rebranded venture.
The Pronto Acquisition
The acquisition of Pronto brings autonomous-vehicle expertise and a controversial figure back into Kalanick’s orbit. Pronto was founded by Anthony Levandowski, the former Google and Uber engineer who was convicted in a high-profile trade-secrets case involving autonomous driving technology. Levandowski received a presidential pardon before founding Pronto, which focuses on Level 4 autonomy for large haul trucks at mining and construction sites, according to Fortune.
Kalanick is already Pronto’s largest investor and is acquiring the remaining shares to consolidate the autonomous-vehicle technology under the Atoms umbrella, as reported by SiliconANGLE.
What We Don’t Know
- How many employees Atoms currently has, beyond the description that it “quietly employed thousands.”
- The exact financial terms of the Pronto acquisition.
- Whether Atoms has secured new external funding beyond the more than one billion dollars previously raised by City Storage Systems.
- How the “wheelbase” platform will compete with established industrial automation providers and well-funded robotics startups backed by Amazon, Tesla, and others.
- Specific revenue figures for CloudKitchens or any other Atoms division.
Analysis
Kalanick’s bet against humanoid robots is a notable contrarian position. While companies such as Figure, Boston Dynamics, 1X, and Apptronik chase the vision of general-purpose bipedal machines, Atoms is pursuing a more utilitarian path: specialized wheeled systems designed for repetitive, high-volume industrial tasks where consistency and durability matter more than dexterity.
The strategy carries echoes of Kalanick’s approach at Uber — using software platforms to reshape asset-heavy industries — but applied to physical automation. If the “wheelbase” concept can deliver the same kind of platform economics that underpin the automotive industry, Atoms could carve out a defensible niche in sectors like mining and food service that are less glamorous but more immediately addressable than the humanoid market.
The Levandowski connection, however, is likely to attract scrutiny. Despite the pardon, Levandowski’s conviction in the Waymo trade-secrets case remains one of the most prominent legal battles in autonomous-vehicle history, and his involvement could complicate partnerships and public perception as Atoms moves from stealth to spotlight.