Atoms is a US robotics holding company led by Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former chief executive of Uber. It was formed on March 13, 2026 by renaming City Storage Systems — the parent of Kalanick's ghost-kitchen business CloudKitchens — and adding a robotics focus spanning food, mining and transportation (Source: cnbc.com; techcrunch.com).
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | Private holding company |
| Chief executive | Travis Kalanick |
| Predecessor entity | City Storage Systems (parent of CloudKitchens) |
| Divisions | Atoms Food, Atoms Mining, Atoms Transport |
| Funding | $1.7B equity, July 2026, led by Andreessen Horowitz |
Strategy
Kalanick set out the company's framing in a roughly 1,700-word vision statement published at launch: "Today we expand our physical world computation portfolio to the Mining and Transport industries and rename the company Atoms... At Atoms we make gainfully employed robots — specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large" (Source: cnbc.com).
The company positions itself against the humanoid form factor that dominates the sector. Kalanick said in a live interview at launch: "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" (Source: techcrunch.com). That distinguishes it from Figure AI and the Chinese humanoid developers; see AI Robotics.
Atoms describes itself as an OEM building "atoms-based" computers for all major industrial sectors, and Kalanick has framed the venture as completing a "bits-to-atoms" arc running from Uber through CloudKitchens (Source: therobotreport.com).
Divisions
The company's website organizes the business into three lines: Atoms Food, "infrastructure for better food," which carries the former CloudKitchens business; Atoms Mining, "more productive mines"; and Atoms Transport, described as a "wheelbase for robots" — a common mobility base intended to be applied across specialized robots rather than sold as a finished vehicle (Source: cnbc.com).
At launch Kalanick said he was close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous-vehicle company focused on industrial and mining sites founded by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski; later coverage of the July funding described Pronto as acquired (Source: techcrunch.com). Asked about moving people rather than materials, Kalanick declined to commit in the near term: "Once you crack movement in the physical world, there's lots of people who want access to that."
Funding
On July 22, 2026 Atoms raised $1.7 billion in equity led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the board and Uber participating (Source: techcrunch.com). Uber's participation is notable given that the Atoms website makes no mention of the company Kalanick co-founded (Source: techcrunch.com).
Open questions
- No robot product has been publicly demonstrated, and the technical content of the "wheelbase" is not described on the sources reviewed here.
- Whether the Pronto acquisition closed, and on what terms, is not established.
- The revenue and current scale of the former CloudKitchens business inside Atoms are not disclosed.
Relationships
- related: AI Robotics — specialized industrial robots rather than humanoids
- contradicts: Figure AI — Kalanick's stated position is that specialized robots, not humanoids, suit industrial-scale work
- related: Embodied AI vs AGI (China's Race Redirect) — physical-world automation
- related: Transportation — AI Deployment — the Atoms Transport line and the Pronto autonomous-vehicle acquisition
- related: AI Displacement vs. Augmentation — the "gainfully employed robots" framing addresses labour directly