전 우버 CEO 칼라닉, 로봇 공방 '애텀스'로 1.7조 원 유치

Travis Kalanick's robotics company, Atoms, has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz will join the company's board following the investment. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and others participated in the round. Perhaps most notably, Uber also joined the funding round, re-connecting Kalanick with the company he founded — and the same company that pushed him out as CEO in 2017 following complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace. Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created atop the project Kalanick has been working on since he resigned from Uber, a ghost kitchen play called Cloud Kitchens. When he revealed the new name in March, Kalanick announced he had acquired Pronto, the heavy industry automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick has also said he wants to get into mining with atoms, going beyond what Pronto already does for vehicles in that industry. Last year, it was reported that Kalanick was interested in buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI with backing from Uber. The Information reported in March that those talks had ended. In a post on X about the fundraise, Kalanick didn't go into specifics about what he wants to build with Atoms. "On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business. Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens and will now finish at Atoms," Kalanick wrote. "16 years ago, I started a journey to digitize the physical world. Understand, predict and control the physical world with software. Building ‘atoms-based' computers where CPU is manufacturing, storage is real estate, and network is transportation." Kalanick has said he wants to build a "wheelbase for robots" with Atoms. "Travis is Back," declared a simultaneous post from Ben Horowitz on Wednesday. "It takes a rare kind of entrepreneur to change these old-school, heavy parts of our economy. They need a gritty work ethic, drive, and range that spans across domains, from software architecture to mechanical engineering. Travis is that guy," said Horowitz. Horowitz wrote that Atoms will be all about making people more productive in the physical world. "I think the most valuable thing someone could do with AI and robotics is to repeat the same thing Uber did for transportation, or that computers did for the digital world: to make everything and everyone more productive ," his post reads. Kalanick didn't go into specifics, but it sounds like a good chunk of funding will go towards hiring. "Changemakers, the builders of tomorrow’s progress machines, will inevitably go up against the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change. Nature is going to throw everything it has at the builders in this new industrial age and it’s going to take humanity’s strongest to stay the course and get these complex systems and industries over the finish line," he wrote. Topics a16z , AI , Andreessen Horowitz , Fundraising , robotics , Travis Kalanick , Venture When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission . This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Sean O'Kane Sr. Reporter, Transportation Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane. You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal. View Bio October 13 - 15 San Francisco Scale faster. Grow your portfolio. Gain practical expertise. No matter your goal, Disrupt can empower you. Save up to $330 toda y! REGISTER NOW Most Popular Jack Dorsey is taking on Slack with Buzz, a group chat platform for teams and their AI agents Amanda Silberling Light made a flip phone — it's colorful and it's cheap Amanda Silberling AI music generator Suno breach affects 55M users, per Have I Been Pwned Zack Whittaker Anthropic's landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved Kirsten Korosec Google is working on a new AI chip designed to make Gemini more efficient Lucas Ropek Judge pauses $110B Paramount-Warner Bros. merger Aisha Malik Coca-Cola suspended production at its Fairlife dairy after a ransomware attack Zack Whittaker