Travis Kalanick launches Atoms to build 'wheelbase for robots'

Travis Kalanick announced Atoms, a new venture he says will build a "wheelbase for robots." He published a more-than-1,600-word manifesto on Friday and wrote, "The thing is, I never left." Kalanick said Atoms is coming out of stealth and expanding beyond food-delivery infrastructure into food service, mining, and transportation, and that he will fold his ghost-kitchen startup CloudKitchens into the new venture.

Atoms aims to power specialized industrial machines rather than humanoid designs. "At Atoms we make gainfully employed robots — specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large," Kalanick wrote. He added the company had been in stealth for eight years, had thousands of employees, and was renamed from City Storage Systems.

Kalanick said Atoms is close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous-vehicle startup founded by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. He framed the move as a focus on practical industrial systems rather than humanlike robots.

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