(Bloomberg) — Uber Technologies Inc. co-founder Travis Kalanick has launched a new venture that will focus on creating “gainfully employed robots” for the food, mining and transport industries.
Kalanick is transforming his real estate company, City Storage Systems, which owns ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens, and renaming it Atoms, according to a manifesto posted on the new company’s website. In addition to its work on food, Los Angeles-based Atoms is expanding into robotics technology for mining and automotive transport.
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Kalanick said on the livestreamed tech talk show TBPN Friday that Atoms has effectively been in stealth for eight years, and has “thousands” of employees.
Kalanick was ousted as chief executive officer at Uber in 2017 and left the board in 2019, severing, at the time, his last ties to the company he started. On the Atoms website, in at-times emotional language, he described the new company as his next great effort after his removal.
“I bled, but I did not perish,” Kalanick wrote. “I got back up and fought my way back into the arena.”
Kalanick’s ambitions in automation in driving date back to when he was still at the helm at Uber a decade ago, as he saw Google’s nascent self-driving car project — which became Waymo — as a growing threat. In 2020, after Kalanick had left, Uber sold its self-driving car unit to Aurora Innovation Inc.
Kalanick wrote on the Atom website that his company will make “specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large.” He added that the company will make “infrastructure for better food,” as well as “more productive mines to power earth’s industries” in addition to “wheelbase for robots” in transportation.
(Adds Uber background in the sixth paragraph.)
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