Travis Kalanick's robotics company raises $1.7B
Travis Kalanick's new robotics company, Atoms, has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Uber also participated in the investment round.
Travis Kalanick’s robotics company, Atoms, has secured $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz will join the company's board.
Additional participation in the round came from Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and other investors. Notably, Uber also joined the funding round, marking a reunion between Kalanick and the company he founded and departed from in 2017.
Atoms represents an expansion from Kalanick's previous venture, CloudKitchens. In March, Kalanick announced the company had acquired Pronto, a heavy industry automation firm founded by Kalanick’s former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick has expressed ambitions to move into the mining sector beyond Pronto’s current operations.
Kalanick has previously described Atoms as a "wheelbase for robots" and a continuation of his "bits-to-atoms" story, an arc he began at Uber and continued with CloudKitchens. Andreessen Horowitz's Ben Horowitz highlighted Kalanick's unique entrepreneurial drive to transform established industrial sectors.
The company aims to leverage artificial intelligence and robotics to enhance productivity in the physical world, drawing parallels to Uber's impact on transportation and computing's effect on information.