Travis Kalanick’s New Obsession: Building a Robot Army

Travis Kalanick has never been known for thinking small. The Uber co-founder who once tried to reinvent urban transportation is now aiming at something far more ambitious: the physical world itself.

In a dense, manifesto-style post stretching roughly 1,700 words, Kalanick laid out a sweeping vision for a new robotics company called Atoms. The premise sounds almost philosophical: treat atoms the way software engineers treat bits. In other words, bring the logic, speed, and scalability of software into the messy world of physical labor.

"The imperative is movement and action in the physical world with a software-like perspective on physical automation," Kalanick wrote. "Think of it as treating atoms like bits."

Behind that line sits a quiet transformation years in the making.

According to reporting from Bloomberg, Kalanick has spent nearly eight years working largely out of the spotlight. During that time he reportedly assembled thousands of employees and gradually shifted his real estate venture, City Storage Systems, toward robotics manufacturing. The result of that long pivot is Atoms, a company focused on building robots designed to operate across food infrastructure, mining operations, and transportation systems.

The long road from ghost kitchens to robotics

City Storage Systems wasn’t originally about robots at all. The company made its name through CloudKitchens, a network of so-called ghost kitchens—facilities designed exclusively for delivery-only restaurants. The concept exploded during the pandemic as food delivery surged worldwide. Later, the market cooled, and some of that early hype faded.

But the ghost kitchen experiment appears to have served another purpose: a testing ground for automation.

Inside those kitchens, machines began taking on tasks that once required human prep work. One example is Bowl Builder, a system designed to assemble customizable salads—sometimes priced around $20—with minimal human intervention. The partnership behind that system stretches back years and reflects Kalanick’s ongoing fascination with automating repetitive physical tasks.

Zoom out and a pattern starts to emerge. Kalanick had previously pushed Uber aggressively toward autonomous vehicles before stepping down from the company in 2017. He later invested in Pronto, a startup developing self-driving dump trucks for mining operations. Each of these ventures points toward the same destination: large-scale automation of physical systems.

Atoms simply pulls those threads together.

Rather than focusing on a single robot or niche product, the new company appears to be chasing a broader infrastructure play. Robots that prepare food. Robots that move materials. Robots that transport goods. All coordinated through software systems that treat physical tasks almost like lines of code.

Kalanick frames the opportunity in almost historical terms. Software, he argues, has already conquered the worlds of language and mathematics. But the automation of physical work—true autonomy in factories, kitchens, mines, and logistics networks—remains largely untouched.

If that frontier opens, he believes it could trigger what he calls a new “Golden Age” of productivity and abundance.

It’s an enormous claim. But then again, massive bets are familiar territory for Kalanick.

Not everything in his orbit has gone smoothly. Just last year, CloudKitchens' Middle Eastern division reportedly ran into complications that stalled a planned IPO on stock exchanges in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia. The setback highlighted the volatile path many of Kalanick’s ventures travel.

Still, the shift toward robotics suggests he’s thinking decades ahead rather than quarters. Food production, resource extraction, and transportation remain some of the most labor-intensive industries on Earth. Automating even a fraction of those processes could reshape entire sectors.

And if Kalanick’s thesis proves right, the next technological revolution may not live inside apps or screens.

It might live in machines that move, lift, cook, drive, and quietly run the physical world around us.

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