Atoms

Atoms is an industrial-robotics company founded by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, who serves as its chief executive. Unveiled in March 2026 after roughly eight years in stealth, Atoms rolls Kalanick's ghost-kitchen business CloudKitchens together with Pronto — the autonomous-haulage startup founded by former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski — into a single holding company organized around three divisions: Atoms Food, Atoms Mining, and Atoms Transport. Kalanick's thesis is "gainfully employed robots": wheeled, task-specific machines built for high-cycle industrial work rather than general-purpose humanoids — what the company calls a "wheelbase for robots."

The clearest evidence that this is more than a pitch is Pronto, the autonomy engine behind Atoms Mining. Pronto's OEM-agnostic Autonomous Haulage System has run commercially in mining and aggregates: at the Lake Bridgeport quarry it hauled more than two million tons of limestone autonomously over eight months, operating North America's first fully autonomous mixed-fleet quarry by integrating Caterpillar and Komatsu trucks under one system. In 2026 Pronto began expanding to additional Heidelberg Materials sites in Indiana and Texas and signed partnerships with Hitachi Construction Machinery and Komatsu North America, alongside a tiered "AHS Editions" product line.

In July 2026 Atoms raised $1.7 billion in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz — with Ben Horowitz joining its board — and participation from Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and Uber, one of the largest financings yet for the "physical AI" thesis of applying learned models to heavy industry. The AI substance is concentrated in the Mining and Transport divisions, where Pronto's perception and autonomy stack is load-bearing; the Food division, rooted in CloudKitchens' real-estate and logistics operations, is the least AI-native of the three. Whether a single holding company can execute across mining, transport, and food at once is the central open question.