- Travis Kalanick launches Atoms, a new venture aiming to build a "wheelbase for robots."
- Atoms wants to build a platform for specialized industrial robots, not humanoid designs.
- Atoms is acquiring Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup founded by Anthony Levandowski.
The former Uber CEO is venturing into robotics.
Travis Kalanick announced that Atoms is out of stealth mode and expanding beyond food delivery infrastructure into industries such as food service, mining, and transportation.
"When I told my friends, family, and colleagues about my plans for what was next, they were really excited that I was 'coming back,'" Kalanick wrote on the website for the new venture.
"The thing is, I never left."
In an interview on "TBPN" on Friday, Kalanick told show hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays that he will be folding his ghost-kitchen startup CloudKitchens into the new venture, a detail that is also mentioned on Atoms' website.
Atoms' webpage says the company plans to build a "wheelbase for robots," a platform designed to power specialized machines rather than humanoid robots. Kalanick said on "TBPN" that the company will focus on practical industrial systems instead of humanlike designs, and that the venture was just renamed as "Atoms" from "City Storage Systems" today.
"We've been in stealth mode for eight years," said Kalanick. "Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. We have thousands of employees."
"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 added.
According to Kalanick, Atoms is close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was founded by his former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski.
Uber didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The post 'I never left': Travis Kalanick launches new company Atoms appeared first on Business Insider
