Atoms raises $1.7B as Kalanick targets food, mining, transport

Atoms, Kalanick's industrial-AI venture, raised $1.7 billion from Andreessen Horowitz — Ben Horowitz's largest-ever check — to automate food production, mining, and autonomous transport across what Kalanick calls "multiple, multiple trillion-dollar industries."

"The final boss for progress — the boss you gotta go up against, and every one of the entrepreneurs in this room knows it — it's called resistance to change," Kalanick said at the Atoms launch event in Los Angeles, where he and Horowitz detailed the company's structure and strategy.

Atoms operates three "atoms-based computers": robotic food production targeting $6-8 per meal, mining automation pitching a 20 percent annual production uplift to gold mine CEOs, and a horizontal autonomy platform for wheeled industrial machines. The company consolidates CloudKitchens — which grew to 500-plus facilities across 30 countries under the City Storage Systems umbrella — with the Pronto mining-autonomy acquisition and a transport unit created in late 2025. Uber, which ousted Kalanick in 2017, participated in the round alongside Bain Capital and Fifth Wall Capital.

The bet is that physical AI will dwarf digital AI. Kalanick frames ride-sharing as the "gold medal" of autonomy but argues transport is "full of silver medals" — food delivery, parcel delivery, trucking, and off-road mining, each a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. Uber is spending $10 billion on its autonomous-vehicle strategy, yet autonomous rides still account for roughly 0.5 percent of total trip volume, according to DA Davidson.

Kalanick's framework maps the physical world onto computer architecture: manufacturing is the CPU that processes atoms, real estate is the storage that holds them, and logistics is the network that moves them. Uber, in his telling, was a network for the physical world that never fully digitized it. "Now we're getting there," he said of autonomy. "Of course, I think people are still driving them from the Philippines or something like this" — a jab at the remote human operators still behind the wheel of some robotaxis.

The food unit asks whether a robotically produced, robotically delivered meal can approach the cost of going to the grocery store. That requires three automated layers: robotic production at $6-8 per meal, robotic couriers — "what I like to call autonomous burritos" — and the industrial real estate housing both. The mining unit pitches gold mine CEOs directly: "Would you like 20 percent more gold per year? We haven't heard no. But they say, 'Prove it.'" The transport unit is the "wheelbase for robots" — a horizontal autonomy platform Kalanick argues must be built in-house because no external vendor can be trusted to deliver it.

The Uber gang reassembles

The talent reunion is a substantial part of the pitch. Kalanick said he received thousands of inbound inquiries from Uber employees while still on Uber's board, which forced restraint — hiring en masse from a company whose board you sit on is "not just a bad look; it's actually illegal." Named arrivals include Gautam (former Uber CFO), Ganesh (former VP/SVP of engineering), Eric Meyhofer (who ran Uber's Advanced Technology Group, now leading food robotics), and Anthony Levandowski (self-driving technology leader, now at Atoms via the Pronto acquisition).

Horowitz said his conviction was instantaneous: "I was at a hundred when I first started talking to him... the only question for me was, was it gonna be one thing?" — whether the separate entities would consolidate. The clinching evidence: "He was still Travis. He hadn't turned into... he wasn't living his best life."

The competitive field

Kalanick's stance is deliberately contrarian on humanoids: they suit low-scale tasks in human environments, but high-scale industrial work demands specialized wheeled machines. He names Elon Musk as the benchmark — "Dude, Elon's the GOAT. I'm like, 'Dude, I'm a baby goat.'" — and frames the competitive twist as a flank play: "if you make autonomy and you make it really fast, faster than Waymo's making it... there is a dark horse angle."

The broader physical-AI market is still at the starting gate. Goldman Sachs projects a $38 billion humanoid TAM by 2035, while Morgan Stanley estimates $5 trillion in market value by 2050. Applied Intuition, another physical-AI player, launched its Dana platform this year to democratize autonomous system development, targeting the same industrial sectors.

For investors, the question is whether Atoms can convert its "20 percent more gold" pitch into production data. Every mining CEO answers the same way — "Prove it." The food unit must show that a robot-produced, robot-delivered meal genuinely approaches grocery-store prices. The structure — one board, shared infrastructure, three focused units — is built to let each vertical prove itself without the sprawl of a conglomerate. But the biggest risk may be the one Kalanick himself names: resistance to change. If the second industrial revolution is a guide, that resistance arrives with strikes, sabotage, and well-funded incumbents.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.