Atoms

Industrial Robotics · Physical AI

Funding

Travis Kalanick's Atoms raises $1.7B led by a16z for industrial AI

The company that forced him out as CEO in 2017 has just become an investor in his next chapter.

• Atoms, Travis Kalanick's industrial AI holding company, closed a $1.7 billion equity round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz taking a board seat.
• Atoms merges CloudKitchens, Kalanick's ghost-kitchen business, with Pronto, the heavy-industry automation firm run by former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, into three divisions: Atoms Food, Atoms Mining and Atoms Transport.
• Uber, the ride-hailing giant that pushed Kalanick out as CEO in 2017 amid harassment and workplace-culture complaints, joined the round as an equity investor eight years later.
• Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and Barclays supplied debt financing alongside the equity, a project-finance style structure suited to capital-intensive industrial rollouts.
• No valuation has been disclosed for the round, and Atoms has not shared revenue or deployment figures for Pronto or a breakdown of how the $1.7B splits across its three divisions.
• The round underscores a16z's bet that specialized industrial robots, not humanoids, will drive automation in heavy sectors like mining and transport, putting Atoms in competition with Tesla Optimus and Figure AI for the same pilot contracts.