Kalanick's Atoms pursues robotaxi technology it publicly disavows

Atoms, the industrial-automation company Travis Kalanick has built in the years since he was pushed out as Uber's chief executive, is developing self-driving vehicle technology and has held preliminary discussions with Uber about deploying it on Uber's ride-hailing network, according to a Financial Times report corroborated Sunday by TechCrunch and other outlets. The work is being led by Anthony Levandowski, the self-driving engineer whose theft of Google trade secrets helped end Kalanick's tenure at Uber nine years ago.

Atoms disputes the characterization. The company describes itself as "an industrial software company" with "no plans to enter the saturated robotaxi market," and says Uber is simply one of many investors that could eventually license its technology if doing so made business sense. The company's own public mission statement makes no mention of passenger vehicles, autonomous driving or ride-hailing, focusing instead on automating food production, mining and freight.

The numbers

Uber put $100 million into Atoms as part of a $1.7 billion equity round the startup closed in June, a stake that had not previously been disclosed and was reported for the first time by the Financial Times. The round, announced by Atoms as a consolidation of Kalanick's existing businesses under one equity structure, was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Bain Capital Ventures, Fifth Wall, Chemistry and several other firms also participating, plus a syndicate of banks providing debt financing. Ben Horowitz joined Atoms' board as part of the deal. In the announcement, Kalanick called the raise a chance "to close the loop on some unfinished business," a phrase that outside observers have read as a nod toward the driverless-car ambitions he held while still running Uber. The round formally combined several of Kalanick's existing ventures — including the ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens and the commercial-kitchen automation firm Lab37 — under the single Atoms holding structure, alongside the newly acquired Pronto.

How Levandowski re-entered the picture

The arrangement revives one of Silicon Valley's more notorious partnerships. Levandowski led Uber's self-driving unit after the company acquired his startup Otto in 2016, only for Google's Waymo to sue, alleging he had downloaded roughly 14,000 confidential files before leaving Google and using them to build Otto's technology. Uber settled the case in 2018 for roughly $245 million in equity, and the fallout from the affair was among the pressures that led Uber's board to force Kalanick out as chief executive that same year. Levandowski was later convicted of trade-secret theft and sentenced to prison time before being pardoned by President Trump in January 2021.

Levandowski resurfaced with Pronto, a startup building autonomous haulage systems for mines and quarries — off-road machinery rather than street-legal robotaxis. Atoms acquired Pronto in March, when Kalanick first unveiled Atoms publicly after operating in relative stealth for roughly eight years under its former name, City Storage Systems. According to the Financial Times account, it is Levandowski who is now steering the robotaxi push inside Atoms, working separately from Pronto's mining business. When Kalanick took Atoms public with its rebrand, he framed the company's approach as favoring narrow, purpose-built machines over general-purpose humanoid robots, telling reporters at the time that "humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way." A wheeled, road-going robotaxi would sit uneasily between those two categories — closer to a consumer product than the mining rigs and kitchen-automation systems that make up the rest of Atoms' portfolio.

Who is watching

The disclosure lands at a moment when the robotaxi market is already crowded and closely scrutinized, with established operators expanding service and regulators paying close attention to any new entrant's safety claims. For Uber, a quiet stake in a potential new autonomous-driving supplier would mark the ride-hailing company's first direct business dealings with Kalanick since his 2017 departure, a relationship both sides have generally kept at arm's length in public. For Atoms' other investors, the reported robotaxi work sits awkwardly with a fundraising pitch built around industrial automation in food, mining and freight rather than consumer transportation. And for Kalanick personally, any return to passenger autonomy revives a project he was not able to see through at Uber: the company's in-house self-driving unit, formed the year before Levandowski joined and later sold off entirely once the legal and financial costs of the Waymo dispute became clear.

"An industrial software company" with "no plans to enter the saturated robotaxi market" — Atoms, in response to the Financial Times report

Coverage of the Financial Times report, including from SiliconANGLE, noted the irony of the arrangement: the same trade-secret dispute that cost Uber roughly $245 million and contributed to Kalanick's ouster is now the basis for Uber quietly bankrolling a company that employs the engineer at the center of that dispute. Neither Uber nor Atoms has offered further public comment beyond the denial Atoms gave to the Financial Times.

What happens next

Atoms is reportedly preparing for a hiring push and additional acquisitions as it builds out its automation businesses, though the company has not laid out a public timeline for any vehicle product, robotaxi or otherwise. The "Transport" division listed on Atoms' own website currently carries only a placeholder marked "announcement soon," leaving the scope and timing of any autonomous-driving effort to further reporting rather than a company disclosure. Given the size of Uber's investment and the profile of the engineer now doing the work, any move by Atoms into passenger-carrying vehicles would draw immediate attention from regulators and rival operators already contending with scrutiny of their own driverless fleets.