Travis Kalanick has launched a new company called Atoms that focuses on robotics

Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, has a new company called Atoms that focuses on robots, which, according to its website, will work in the food, mining and transportation industries.

Kalanick is transitioning his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It’s not immediately clear how he plans to handle mining and transportation. Atoms’ website says it will build a “wheelbase for robots,” and Kalanick said in a live interview with TBPN on Friday that his company will apply that wheelbase to “specialized robots” — not humanoid robots.

“Humanoid robots have their place, but there is a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient way at an industrial level, which is kind of where we play,” he said.

Earlier Friday, The Information reported that Kalanick was returning to self-driving cars “with significant support” from Uber, and that he told people he “wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology from Waymo.” Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Atoms website does not mention Uber.

The Information also reported that Kalanick is considering acquiring Pronto, a self-driving car startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former ride-hailing colleague Anthony Levandowski. There is no mention of Pronto or Levandowski on the Atoms website.

Last year, Kalanick was said to be interested in buying the US arm of Chinese self-driving car company Pony AI with backing from Uber, although The Information said on Friday that those talks had ended.

Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 after a series of crises at the ride-hailing company. At the time, the company was plagued by complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, prompting an external investigation that led to the dismissal of more than 20 employees.

Before that, Kalanick created a self-driving division at Uber in 2015. Levandowski played a large role in this project after Kalanick lured him away from Google. Eventually, Google sued Uber for stealing secrets related to its self-driving car project (which eventually became Waymo). The two companies reached a settlement, but Levandowski was charged with criminal charges and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in the case. Al-Muhandis received a last-minute pardon from President Trump at the end of his first term.

The company continued to work on the project after Kalanick’s resignation, including after one of its experimental vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018. Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, closed the division and sold it to independent trucking company Aurora in 2020.

In a rare interview in March 2025, Kalanick expressed his regret that Uber was abandoning development of its self-driving cars.

This story has been updated to reflect new information from the Atoms website and an interview with Kalanick.