Travis Kalanick, the co-founder who was forced out of Uber in 2017, has emerged from nearly eight years of silence with a new industrial robotics company called Atoms. The venture was officially unveiled on March 13 after operating quietly under the parent company City Storage Systems — a name Kalanick chose specifically to avoid public attention.

Wheelbase for Robots

Atoms is built around a concept Kalanick calls a "wheelbase for robots": a common mechanical and software platform that can be adapted for specialized tasks across industries. The initial focus is food, mining, and transportation. The company is rolling in CloudKitchens, Kalanick's ghost-kitchen operation, as its first deployment platform.

Kalanick is deliberate about staying away from humanoid robots. "Humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, industrial-scale kind of way," he said during a live interview on TBPN.

Pronto Acquisition

To extend the platform into mining and autonomous transport, Atoms is in the process of acquiring Pronto — an autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial sites, founded by Anthony Levandowski, the former Google and Uber engineer. Kalanick confirmed he is already Pronto's largest investor.

The Information reported that Uber is backing the venture and that Kalanick has told people he wants to move more aggressively than Waymo on self-driving deployment. Uber did not confirm this publicly.

Whether Atoms can translate Kalanick's operational ambitions into a durable robotics platform will depend on execution — something that famously defined, and eventually derailed, his Uber years.