Atoms, the robotics company owned by Travis Kalanick, closed a $1.7 billion equity round on Wednesday. I was supported by Andreessen Horowitz.
The check is one of the largest yet in the physical AI financing boom that has already attracted record capital in 2026.
Uber is investing in the founder it once forced out
Andreessen Horowitz is the lead investor, and general partner Ben Horowitz will have a seat on the board. On the equity side, new investors include Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, Chemistry, A*, K5 Global, Abstract, SV Angel, and Alpha Square Group.
The round saw an investment from Uber, a company Kalanick co-founded. It’s been about ten years since his board fired him as CEO in 2017. The dismissal came after complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination and workplace culture.
But Kalanick saw the deal as reconciliation, and not just with Uber. He wrote on
The debt partners, including five banks, were listed separately from the equity round. The banks are Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan and Barclays. The size of any loan facility was not disclosed.
Atoms is a holding company. Kalanick stacked it on top of two companies he created after leaving Uber. The first is CloudKitchens, his ghost kitchen operation. The other is Pronto, a heavy industry automation company, which he bought in March 2026 from his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski.
The resulting company will be divided into three divisions, Atoms Food, Atoms Mining, and Atoms Transport. The companies are aimed at food production, mining and heavy transport.
In his book X mailAtoms is an original equipment manufacturer that makes “atom-based computers,” Kalanick said. The money was “fuel to complete the bit-to-atom story that we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens and will now end at Atoms,” he said.
Horowitz was more frank. “Travis is back” he said books. He explained that purpose-built machines, not human machines, are best suited for heavy industry. “Specialists are better suited for most of those jobs,” he wrote. He marketed the upside as productivity.
“Replicating the same thing that Uber did in transportation, or what computers did in the digital world: making everything and everyone more productive,” he said. He said this is the best use of artificial intelligence and robotics.
Robotics funding reaches record high while Atoms remains quiet on numbers
Money is pouring into robots that operate in the real world. Global funding in robotics reached $55.8 billion as of early June 2026, according to data from Dealroom. This is almost double the previous record for the entire year.
The day before Atoms went public, the startup was in the UK Humanoid raised $152 million Reuters said its valuation was $1.35 billion. On July 16, Grid Dynamics unveiled a physical AI partnership with Doosan Robotics. The deal signals a shift in the sector from fundraising to publishing.
AI models also show the pace of progress. Cryptopolitan I mentioned Mistral launched Robostral Navigate on July 8. The 8 billion-parameter system guides the robot using a single camera and clear language instructions. In simulation, the system achieved a score of 76.6% on the invisible benchmark R2R-CE.
Kalanick’s post set X insight. Atoms did not disclose a subsequent valuation of the funds. No debt figure was issued. No trade figures were provided for food, mining or transportation.
