The Uber founder is re-emerging with Atoms, a secretive robotics venture that quietly employed thousands of people before going public, and a philosophy about “profitable robots” that look a lot like Uber but are meant for warehouses.
For eight years, Travis Kalanick ran a company where thousands of employees were not allowed to publicly list their employers. On March 13, 2026, he was ready to stop hiding it.
The company is called Atoms. It builds specialized industrial robots for food service, mining and transportation. And it’s been doing so quietly since around 2017, long before the current wave of excitement about physical AI and humanoid machines.
Atoms is a rebranded version of City Storage Systems, Kalanick’s holding company since it split from Uber in 2017. Its most visible subsidiary, CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen operator that signs leases for commercial eateries and leases them to food delivery brands, folds into Atoms as a transition from the food industry to robotics. platform.
Wheel base for robots
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Kalanick’s core product thesis is what he calls a “wheelbase for robots”: a standardized mobility platform consisting of a common chassis equipped with power, computing and sensors that can then be outfitted for specific industrial tasks. The analogy he draws is to the automotive industry, where one platform supports many vehicle variants. Atoms wants to do the same for task-specific wheeled vehicles.
The pitch is deliberately anti-humanoid. While much of the robotics industry’s current focus has coalesced around bipeds, Boston Dynamics, Image, 1X and others, Kalanick is betting on what he calls “profitable robots”: purpose-built, wheeled systems designed for high-cycle industrial environments where consistency and durability are more important than overall agility.
To expand this platform into mining and autonomous transportation, Atoms is on the verge of acquiring Pronto, an autonomous car startup founded by ex-Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick confirmed that he is already Pronto’s largest investor.
Eight years of silence
The secret period is the most striking element of the story of Atoms. Ghost Kitchens was a visible business, CloudKitchens properties appeared in cities across the US and internationally, and the company raised significant capital. But the parent company and its broader robotics ambitions have been systematically hidden from the public record, including by employees.
Kalanick has said little publicly about why. The most plausible explanation is competitive: a long development runway in a capital-intensive hardware sector requires protection from the attention of better-resourced competitors. Whether eight years of stealth work can produce a product that can compete with the robotics programs of Amazon, Tesla and dozens of well-funded startups is what Atoms’ next chapter will have to prove.
Kalanick knows how to build companies that move fast and are huge. He also knows better than most how quickly a founder’s belief in the future can collide with the present. Atoms is essentially a bet that the physical world will be digitized on an industrial scale, and the company best positioned to build a platform for that transition began quietly in 2017 in what looked like a kitchen.
