Travis Kalanick's robotics company Atoms has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Following the investment, Ben Horowitz will join the company's board of directors.
Bain Capital, Fifth Wall and others participated in this round.
Perhaps most notably, Uber also participated in the funding round, reuniting Mr. Kalanick with the company he founded and the same company that forced him out as CEO in 2017 following complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace.
Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company built on top of a ghost kitchen play called Cloud Kitchens, a project Kalanick has been working on since leaving Uber. When Kalanick unveiled the new company name in March, he announced that he had acquired Pronto, a heavy industrial automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski.
Kalanick also said Pronto would like to move into mining with atoms, beyond what it already does in the auto industry. Last year, it was reported that Kalanick was interested in buying the U.S. division of Chinese self-driving car company Pony AI with backing from Uber. The Information reported in March that those negotiations had ended.
In his post to X about the funding, Kalanick didn't go into detail about what he wants to build with Atoms.
“On many levels, this round is like unfinished business. It's the fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc that started with Uber, continues with CloudKitchens, and now ends with Atoms,” Kalanick wrote. “Sixteen years ago, I began a journey to digitize the physical world. Understand, predict, and control the physical world with software. Building “atom-based” computers where CPUs are manufacturing, storage is real estate, and networks are transportation. ”
Kalanick said he wants to build a “robot wheelbase” with Atoms.
“Travis is back,” Ben Horowitz declared in a simultaneous post on Wednesday. “It takes a rare breed of entrepreneur to change these legacy-heavy parts of our economy. They need a hard work ethic, drive, and cross-disciplinary reach from software architecture to mechanical engineering. Travis is that person,” Horowitz said.
Horowitz writes that Atoms is all about making people more productive in the physical world.
“I think the most valuable thing someone can do with AI and robotics is repeat what Uber did for transportation or what computers did for the digital world: make everything and everyone more productive,” his post reads.
Kalanick didn't go into specifics, but it appears that a significant amount of the funding will go toward recruiting.
“Changemakers, the builders of tomorrow's progress machines, will inevitably come face-to-face with their ultimate boss, Nature, and her fierce resistance to change. Nature intends to throw everything she has at her builders in this new industrial age, and it will take humanity's strongest forces to stay the course and bring these complex systems and industries to the finish line,” he wrote.
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