Travis Kalanick's robotics company Atoms raises 1.7 billion dollars led by a16z

9:50 AM · July 22, 2026

Atoms, the robotics company built by former Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick, raised 1.7 billion dollars in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, according to TechCrunch, with Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and other investors also participating. Notably, Uber itself joined the round, reconnecting Kalanick with the company he co-founded and was ultimately pushed out of as chief executive in 2017. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz will join Atoms's board following the investment, a significant public vote of confidence from one of the venture industry's most prominent investors in Kalanick's post-Uber ambitions. Atoms is effectively a rebranded holding company built on top of the project Kalanick has been pursuing since leaving Uber, incorporating the heavy industry automation company Pronto, run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, which Kalanick acquired earlier this year when he revealed the Atoms name. Kalanick has described his ambition as building what he calls a wheelbase for robots, a general purpose mobility and automation platform other companies could build specialized robots on top of, positioning Atoms as a foundational infrastructure play in physical AI and robotics rather than a single product company, an unusually broad framing for a startup at this stage that nonetheless attracted one of the largest robotics funding rounds of the year.