(Bloomberg) — Uber Technologies Inc. co-founder Travis Kalanick has launched a new venture that will focus on creating “gainfully employed robots” for the food, mining and transport industries.
Kalanick is remaking his real estate company, City Storage Systems, which owns ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens, and renaming it Atoms, according to a manifesto posted on the new company’s website. In addition to its work on food, Los Angeles-based Atoms is expanding into robotics technology for mining and automotive transport.
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Kalanick said on the livestreamed tech talk show TBPN Friday that Atoms has effectively been in stealth for eight years and has “thousands” of employees.
Kalanick was ousted as chief executive officer at Uber in 2017 and left the board in 2019, severing, at the time, his last ties to the company he started. On the Atoms website, in at-times emotional language, he described the new company as his next great effort after his removal.
“I bled, but I did not perish,” Kalanick wrote. “I got back up and fought my way back into the arena.”
Last year, CloudKitchens delayed plans for a public offering of its Middle Eastern business, Bloomberg News reported in December — part of a broader slowdown of public listings in the region. The company had previously been eying a dual-listing in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, which was expected as early as 2026.
Kalanick wrote on the Atoms website that the company will make “specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large.” That will include “infrastructure for better food,” he wrote, as well as “more productive mines to power Earth’s industries” in addition to “wheelbase for robots” in transportation.
“The industrial thing is probably our main jam,” he said on TBPN. “Once you crack movement in the physical world, there are lots of people who want access to that.”
Kalanick’s ambitions in autonomous driving date back to when he was still at the helm at Uber a decade ago, as he saw Google’s nascent self-driving car project — which became Waymo — as a growing threat. In 2020, after Kalanick had left, Uber sold its self-driving car unit to Aurora Innovation Inc.
At Atoms, Kalanick has turned to a team of familiar lieutenants to spearhead key efforts. Eric Meyhofer, a former Carnegie Mellon robotics professor who ran Uber’s self-driving unit, is leading the company’s food robotics division Lab37 in Pittsburgh, Kalanick said on TBPN. The lab makes a food assembly machine called Bowl Builder, according to its website.