Uber ex-CEO Kalanick rebrands latest venture Atoms, move into robotics
Travis Kalanick, CEO of City Storage Systems (CSS), during the Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute Priority conference on Friday, February 21, 2025 in Miami, Florida, USA.
Zak Bennett | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Uber founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick has renamed his latest startup Atoms and is expanding beyond food into mining and transportation, he said Friday.
Kalanick, who was forced to resign from Uber in 2017, joined City Storage Systems as CEO the following year. City Storage is the parent company of CloudKitchens, the ghost kitchen operator that Kalanick has fast-tracked to a $15 billion valuation by 2022.
Kalanick, who founded Uber in 2009, said on the TBPN podcast Friday that Atoms had been secretly operating for eight years with “thousands of employees.” And Kalanick on Atoms’ new website wrote Nearly 1,700 words describing its mission.
“Today we are expanding our physical world computing portfolio to include the Mining and Transportation industries and renaming the company Atoms,” Kalanick wrote. Regarding the technology, he added: “At Atoms we profitable robots – specialized robots with productive work that bring abundance to their owners and society at large.”
Information reported On Friday, Kalanick was preparing to unveil a new robotics and driverless car company with backing from Uber, people familiar with the matter said.
“Until today, I was running a company called City Storage Systems, which was basically about the future of food,” said Kalanick at TBPN. He said the concept is about making ready-meal delivery more efficient than grocery shopping.
On the Atoms website, Kalanick said the company focuses on three subcategories: Atoms Food, which is “infrastructure for better food,” Atoms Mining, which provides “more efficient mines,” Atoms Transport, which is “wheelbase for robots.”
Cloud Kitchens The website is still live. The company operates commercial kitchens that restaurants large and small can use to assist with delivery, pickup and food production.
On the Atoms website, Kalanick says he joined the startup after leaving Uber “heartbroken.”
“I bled but I didn’t die,” Kalanick wrote. “I stood up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my post. Back into the building.”
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