REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
- Travis Kalanick launches Atoms, a new venture aiming to build a "wheelbase for robots."
- Atoms wants to build a platform for specialized industrial robots, not humanoid designs.
- Atoms is acquiring Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup founded by Anthony Levandowski.
The former Uber CEO is venturing into robotics.
Travis Kalanick announced that Atoms is out of stealth mode and expanding beyond food delivery infrastructure into industries such as food service, mining, and transportation.
The ex-Uber CEO published a 1,600-plus manifesto of his company on Friday.
"When I told my friends, family, and colleagues about my plans for what was next, they were really excited that I was 'coming back,'" Kalanick wrote on the website for the new venture.
"The thing is, I never left."
Kalanick did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.
In an interview on "TBPN" on Friday, Kalanick told show hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays that he will be folding his ghost-kitchen startup CloudKitchens into the new venture, a detail that is also mentioned on Atoms' website.
Atoms' webpage says the company plans to build a "wheelbase for robots," a platform designed to power specialized machines rather than humanoid robots.
"At Atoms we make gainfully employed robots — specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large," Kalanick wrote on the website.
Kalanick said on "TBPN" that the company will focus on practical industrial systems instead of humanlike designs, and that the venture was just renamed as "Atoms" from "City Storage Systems" today.
"We've been in stealth mode for eight years," said Kalanick. "Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. We have thousands of employees."
"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 added.
According to Kalanick, Atoms is close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous-vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites, founded by his former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski.
Uber didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kalanick's partnership with Levandowski would be the reunion of two of the most infamous Uber alums.
Levandowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009 and was its CEO until 2017, when he resigned after facing immense investor pressure stemming from reports of a toxic work culture and multiple clashes with regulators.
Levandowski, an alum of Google's self-driving project that is now Waymo, was brought into Uber in 2016 after the ride-hailing giant bought his self-driving trucking outfit, Otto. In less than a year, he was fired from the company after Google sued Uber, accusing Levandowski of stealing trade secrets from the self-driving project. Uber settled with Waymo, but Levandowski was convicted in a separate criminal case in 2020 of one count of trade secret theft.
Levandowski was later pardoned by President Donald Trump before he even began serving an 18-month prison sentence.