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Atoms gets $1.7B
Travis Kalanick’s robotics company Atoms raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the company’s board following the investment.
“We’re backing Travis Kalanick’s “new” company, Atoms, and I’m joining the board”
TechCrunch said Bain Capital and Fifth Wall participated, and it highlighted that Uber also joined the funding round, re-connecting Kalanick with the company he founded and left as CEO in 2017.
In a post on X about the fundraise, Kalanick framed the round as “a bit of unfinished business” and said it would “finish at Atoms,” tying the effort to a “bits-to-atoms story arc” that began at Uber and continued at CloudKitchens.
Kalanick also wrote that he started “a journey to digitize the physical world” and described building “atoms-based” computers where CPU is manufacturing, storage is real estate, and network is transportation.
Ben Horowitz declared “Travis Is Back” and said it takes “a rare kind of entrepreneur to change these old-school, heavy parts of our economy.”
Physical AI pitch
The funding is positioned around “Physical AI” and “Industrial AI,” with Atoms described as digitizing industrial sectors and automating operations across mining, construction, heavy transport, and food production.
StartupHub.ai said the deal consolidates Kalanick’s prior businesses under the ATOMS equity umbrella and described the capital infusion as fueling the “bits-to-atoms” narrative that began with Uber and continued with CloudKitchens.
In the Andreessen Horowitz statement, the firm argued that “Industrial AI” is the “inevitable application of specialized robots to atoms-heavy industries,” and it said specialized robots are “far better suited to most of those jobs.”
The Andreessen Horowitz post also said Atoms makes computers for the physical world and described a mission to give “everybody the opportunity to be productive,” especially “here in America.”
It added that the company’s work spans Atoms Food, Atoms Mining, and Atoms Transport, describing each as part of “trillion dollar industries.”
What comes next
TechCrunch reported that Kalanick did not go into specifics about what he wants to build with Atoms, but it quoted him describing the round as fuel to complete the “bits-to-atoms story arc” and to “finish at Atoms.”
The TechCrunch account also said Kalanick announced he had acquired Pronto, the heavy industry automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, and it noted he has said he wants to get into mining with atoms.
In the Andreessen Horowitz post, Horowitz argued that fast-growing companies doing things in the physical world will have to play on “Hard Mode” and secure their “social license to operate,” becoming essential to people quickly.
StartupHub.ai said the capital infusion is intended to digitize large-scale industrial sectors and that Atoms is positioned as an OEM building “atoms-based” computers for these industrial sectors.
TechCrunch added that Kalanick wrote about hiring, saying “Changemakers, the builders of tomorrow’s progress machines, will inevitably go up against the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change.”
