Travis Kalanick's New Robot Company Isn't About Humanoids

Travis Kalanick is back in the tech game—and he wants you to know he's not building humanoid robots.

The former Uber CEO has officially launched Atoms, a robotics company focused on what he calls "gainfully employed robots"—specialized, task-specific machines for industrial environments. The company, formerly known as City Storage Systems (the parent of ghost kitchen business CloudKitchens), has been in stealth mode for eight years.

"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, which is sort of where we play," Kalanick said in a live interview on Friday.

Atoms plans to operate across three industries: food, mining, and transportation. The company will build a "wheelbase for robots"—essentially a platform for specialized machines rather than general-purpose humanoids. Kalanick argued that a robot making 1,000 pancakes an hour is better served by a specialized machine than a humanoid arm struggling to flip them.

The venture also marks Kalanick's return to autonomous vehicles. He's on the verge of acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites created by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick said he's already Pronto's largest investor.

"The industrial thing is sort of like, probably, our main jam," Kalanick said.

According to The Information, Kalanick has "major backing" from Uber and has told people he wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo. Uber declined to comment.

This is a notable re-entry for Kalanick, who resigned as Uber's CEO in 2017 after a series of crises. His self-driving ambitions at Uber ultimately collapsed after a 2018 fatal accident, and the division was sold to Aurora in 2020.