Kalanick's Atoms raises $1.7B
Travis Kalanick's industrial robotics holding company Atoms raised $1.7 billion led by a16z, reuniting him with Uber as an investor.
Atoms, the industrial robotics holding company built by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, raised $1.7 billion in equity funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, Chemistry, K5 Global, SV Angel, Alpha Square Group, and, notably, Uber itself among the participants. It’s one of the largest robotics funding rounds of 2026, and a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz is joining Atoms’ board. The deal reunites Kalanick with Uber, which forced him out as CEO in 2017.
Atoms emerged from City Storage Systems and absorbed CloudKitchens, and now runs three divisions: Atoms Food, built around CloudKitchens and automated food-prep technology; Atoms Mining, centered on the acquired robotics firm Pronto; and Atoms Transport. Reporting frames the round explicitly as a16z betting on “physical AI,” the industry term for applying AI-driven autonomy to real-world equipment and logistics rather than software alone.
The size of the round says more about investor appetite for physical-AI infrastructure plays right now than it does about any specific product: Atoms hasn’t shipped a headline robotics product under this new structure yet, and the money is spread across three fairly different domains, food automation, mining, and transport. It’s part of the same wave pushing capital into hardware-adjacent AI this week, alongside Etched’s chip funding and AMD’s investment in Anthropic; worth watching for what Atoms actually deploys before treating this as more than a large bet on a well-known founder.