Travis Kalanick’s robotics company raises $1.7B, led by a16z

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, re-connecting Kalanick with the company he founded — and the same company that pushed him out as CEO in 2017 following complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace.

Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created atop the project Kalanick has been working on since he resigned from Uber, a ghost kitchen play called Cloud Kitchens. When he revealed 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 has also said he wants to get into mining with atoms, going beyond what Pronto already does for vehicles in that industry. Last year, it was reported that Kalanick was interested in buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI with backing from Uber. The Information reported in March that those talks had ended.

In a post on X about the fundraise, Kalanick didn’t go into specifics about what he wants to build with Atoms.

“On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business. Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc 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 ‘atoms-based’ computers where CPU is manufacturing, storage is real estate, and network is transportation.”

Kalanick has said he wants to build a “wheelbase for robots” with Atoms.

“Travis Is Back,” declared a simultaneous post from Ben Horowitz on Wednesday. “It takes a rare kind of entrepreneur to change these old-school, heavy parts of our economy. They need a gritty work ethic, drive, and range that spans across domains, from software architecture to mechanical engineering. Travis is that guy,” said Horowitz.

Horowitz wrote that Atoms will be all about making people more productive in the physical world.

“I think the most valuable thing someone could do with AI and robotics is to repeat the same thing Uber did for transportation, or that computers did for the digital world: to make everything and everyone more productive,” his post reads.

Kalanick didn’t go into specifics, but it sounds like a good chunk of funding will go toward hiring.

“Changemakers, the builders of tomorrow’s progress machines, will inevitably go up against the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change. Nature is going to throw everything it has at the builders in this new industrial age and it’s going to take humanity’s strongest to stay the course and get these complex systems and industries over the finish line,” he wrote.