The Uber founder resurfaces with Atoms, a secretive robotics venture that employed thousands stealthily before unveiling itself, and a philosophy about ‘gainfully employed robots’ that resembles Uber’s model, but for warehouses.
For eight years, Travis Kalanick led a company where thousands of employees couldn’t publicly disclose their employer. On March 13, 2026, he was ready to reveal it.
The company is named Atoms. It develops specialized industrial robots for food service, mining, and transport, operating quietly since about 2017, predating the current interest in physical AI and humanoid machines.
Atoms is the revamped form of City Storage Systems, the holding company Kalanick established post-Uber in 2017. Its prominent subsidiary, CloudKitchens, the ghost kitchen operator that leased commercial cooking spaces to food delivery brands, is being integrated into Atoms as the parent company pivots from food infrastructure to a robotics platform.
The wheelbase for robots
Kalanick’s core product concept is a “wheelbase for robots”: a standardized mobility platform with a common chassis featuring power, compute, and sensors, which can be customized for specific industrial tasks. He compares it to the automotive industry, where one platform supports various vehicle variants. Atoms aims to do likewise for task-specific wheeled machines.
The approach is intentionally non-humanoid. While much of the robotics field focuses on bipedal machines, Boston Dynamics, Figure, 1X, and others, Kalanick is investing in what he terms “gainfully employed robots”: purpose-built, wheeled systems for high-cycle industrial settings where consistency and durability are paramount over general dexterity.
To expand the platform into mining and autonomous transport, Atoms is about to acquire Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup founded by Anthony Levandowski, the former Google and Uber engineer. Kalanick has confirmed he’s already Pronto’s largest investor.
Eight years of silence
The stealth phase is the most striking aspect of the Atoms narrative. Ghost kitchens were a visible venture, CloudKitchens’ properties appeared in cities across the US and globally, and the company secured significant funding. However, the parent entity and its broader robotics goals were systematically concealed from the public, even from employees.
Kalanick hasn’t publicly expounded on the reasons. The most plausible rationale is competitive: an extended development period in a capital-intensive hardware sector needs shielding from the scrutiny of better-resourced competitors. Whether eight years of stealth have yielded a product capable of competing with the robotics initiatives of Amazon, Tesla, and numerous well-funded startups is what Atoms’ next chapter will have to demonstrate.
Kalanick is experienced in building companies that scale rapidly. He also understands, more than many, how swiftly a founder’s vision for the future can clash with the present. Atoms is fundamentally a wager that the physical world is on the verge of digital transformation at an industrial scale, and the company best suited to craft the platform for this transition began discreetly, in 2017, in a business resembling kitchens.