Atoms
Private- HQ
- Los Angeles, California, US
- Founded
- 2018
- Founders
- Travis Kalanick
- Products
- CloudKitchens delivery-kitchen facilities, Otter restaurant OS, Lab37 Bowl Builder kitchen robot, Picnic workplace meal delivery, ProFood Properties, Pronto autonomous haulage for mines and quarries
The renamed City Storage Systems, Travis Kalanick's holding company, which spent eight years in stealth building delivery-kitchen real estate before opening up in March 2026 as an industrial robotics group organized into Atoms Food, Atoms Mining and Atoms Transport. Its stated thesis is specialized "gainfully employed robots" for high-cycle industrial work rather than general-purpose humanoids. Food is the operating business; mining, built on the acquired Pronto, is the newer bet Kalanick himself describes mine operators as answering with "prove it."
Funding
$1.7B equity round announced July 2026, led by a16z, plus undisclosed debt facilities from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and Barclays. Post-money valuation was not disclosed. Earlier rounds raised under the CloudKitchens name total at least $1.25B — a reported $400M from Saudi Arabia's PIF in 2019 and $850M completed in 2021 at a reported $15B valuation.
Key investors
a16z (lead, Ben Horowitz on the board), Uber, Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, Chemistry, A*, K5 Global, Abstract, SV Angel, Alpha Square Group; Saudi PIF and Microsoft invested in the CloudKitchens era
Last checked: 2026-08-18
Products & deep dives
Atoms: Inside Travis Kalanick's Industrial Robotics Company
Eight years after leaving Uber, Travis Kalanick renamed his holding company City Storage Systems to Atoms, folded CloudKitchens and the acquired mining-autonomy startup Pronto into it, and raised $1.7 billion led by a16z — with Uber itself among the investors. Its thesis is the opposite of the humanoid consensus: specialized robots with a job, not general-purpose bodies.
Travis Kalanick: From Uber to Atoms
A teenage knife salesman and an SAT-prep founder at 18, sued into bankruptcy over a file-sharing service in his twenties, builder of a global ride-hailing company, forced out of it at 40 by his own investors — and back in 2026 with a $1.7 billion industrial robotics group he assembled over eight years without saying much about it.