Travis Kalanick has closed a $1.7 billion round led by Andreessen Horowitz for Atoms, a holding company that folds CloudKitchens and the robotics firm Pronto into one bet on automating food, mining and transport. Ben Horowitz joins the board and no valuation was disclosed.
Read the full story: Kalanick's Atoms Raises $1.7B to Automate Industry →
Transcript
Travis Kalanick has raised one point seven billion dollars for a company called Atoms. Andreessen Horowitz led it and Ben Horowitz took a board seat. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall and, notably, Uber all put money in. Atoms isn't really a startup. It's a holding company. Kalanick folded CloudKitchens, his ghost kitchen business, together with Pronto, a heavy industry autonomy firm he bought from Anthony Levandowski. The plan is one shared robotics layer serving food, mining and transport. No valuation was disclosed, which at this size usually means the structure is complicated rather than embarrassing. Here's the thing to watch. Not the round size. Whether autonomous haul trucks actually run production shifts at named mine sites in eighteen months.