Uber founder Travis Kalanick has a new company called Atoms focused on robotics that, according to its website, will operate in the food, mining, and transportation industries.
Kalanick is rolling his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It’s not immediately clear how he plans to tackle mining and transportation. Atoms’ website says it will build a “wheelbase for robots,” and Kalanick said in a live interview with TBPN on Friday that his company will apply this wheelbase to “specialized robots” — not humanoids.
“Humanoids have their place, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play,” he said.
To support the mining business, Kalanick said Friday that he’s on the precipice of acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick revealed Friday that he is already the “largest investor” in Pronto.
“The industrial thing is sort of like, probably, our main jam,” Kalanick told TBPN. Kalanick demurred on the idea of using Atoms robots to move people, at least in the near-term. “Once you crack movement in the physical world, there’s lots of people who want access to that.”
Earlier Friday The Information reported Kalanick was getting back into self-driving vehicles with “major backing” from Uber, and that he has reportedly told people he “wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo.” Uber didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Atoms’ website makes no mention of Uber. The Information first reported Kalanick was discussing acquiring Pronto.
Last year, Kalanick was said to be interested in buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI with backing from Uber, though The Information said Friday that those talks ended.
Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 after a confluence of crises a …