Travis Kalanick, who co-founded Uber before resigning in 2017, announced on Friday that he is rebranding his holding company City Storage Systems as Atoms Inc. — a robotics venture targeting specialized industrial automation in food, mining, and transportation.

Kalanick described his mission as building "gainfully employed robots — specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large." In a live interview on TBPN, he was explicit that humanoids are not the focus: "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."

What's Inside Atoms

Atoms absorbs three existing businesses. Atoms Food centers on CloudKitchens (the ghost kitchen network Kalanick built after Uber) and a software suite called Otter. Lab37, an in-house R&D unit, has developed the Bowl Builder — a 19-foot kitchen robot capable of automating up to 40% of manual food-prep tasks.

Atoms Mining and Atoms Transport both hinge on Pronto AI, an autonomous vehicle startup founded by Anthony Levandowski. Pronto builds Level 4 self-driving systems for mining haul trucks, relying on GPS, cameras, and radar to navigate mines without human input. Kalanick disclosed he is already Pronto's largest investor and is close to acquiring the remaining shares.

City Storage Systems had raised over $1 billion in equity and debt before the rebrand. The Information reported that Atoms will also receive "major backing" from Uber — Kalanick's former company.

The move signals a deliberate bet against general-purpose humanoids. While Figure, Tesla Optimus, and Boston Dynamics compete for bipedal dominance, Atoms is chasing the unglamorous but high-margin world of task-specific industrial robots.