Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Launches Atoms to Automate Food Infrastructure With Robotics

Uber founder Travis Kalanick launches Atoms, a robotics company building automated food infrastructure, absorbing CloudKitchens after 8 years in stealth with thousands of employees.

Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Launches Atoms to Automate Food Infrastructure With Robotics Uber founder Travis Kalanick launches Atoms, a robotics company building automated food infrastructure, absorbing CloudKitchens after 8 years in stealth with thousands of employees. March 13, 2026 Key Takeaways: Travis Kalanick launched Atoms on March 13, absorbing ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens into a robotics company focused on food, mining, and transportation after operating in stealth for eight years with thousands of employees. Atoms Food aims to make prepared food delivery so cost-efficient it approaches grocery store prices by building the real estate, developing the software, and using robotics to run automated kitchen facilities at scale. Kalanick is betting on specialized, task-specific robots over humanoid designs, building a modular "wheelbase for robots" platform that can be outfitted for different industrial jobs. Travis Kalanick, who co-founded Uber in 2009 and was ousted as CEO in 2017, launched Atoms on March 13. The company absorbs CloudKitchens, the ghost-kitchen operator Kalanick built to a reported $15 billion valuation by 2022, and renames the parent company City Storage Systems. In a 1,600-word manifesto on the Atoms website, Kalanick described the company as his return to building after leaving Uber "heartbroken." Atoms has been operating in stealth for eight years . Employees were not allowed to list the company name on LinkedIn. Kalanick said Atoms has "thousands" of employees. The company is organized into three divisions: Atoms Food, Atoms Mining, and Atoms Transport. Doing to the Kitchen What Uber Did to the Car The food division is the most developed. Kalanick described the ambition as making prepared meal delivery so cost-efficient that it appro