After eight years in stealth mode, Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick has unveiled a robotics firm focused on the food, mining, and transportation sectors.
Named Atoms, the new company emerged from his real estate business, City Storage Systems—owner of ghost-kitchen brand CloudKitchens.
“The core idea was: Can you make a prepared, delivered meal so efficient that its cost nears what you’d pay at a grocery store?” Kalanick stated during Friday’s TBPN show. “If you can, you’ll transform kitchens the way Uber transformed cars.”
He also mentioned being close to acquiring Pronto—a self-driving startup for industrial and mining sites founded by Anthony Levandowski, a former Uber colleague and Trump administration official. The Information broke news of the deal, noting Uber also backs the company.
In 2017, Kalanick was removed as Uber’s CEO following a shareholder revolt, amid claims he disregarded reports of sexual harassment within the company.
Google also sued Uber, accusing it of stealing autonomous driving trade secrets. Levandowski was convicted but avoided jail time after receiving a pardon from President Donald Trump.
In his TBPN interview, Kalanick admitted the difficulty of leading Uber amid intense public scrutiny and “handling 100 headlines a day.”
“I thought, I just need to wake up every day, focus on work, and build,” he remembered. “So I stayed out of the spotlight.”
But that meant thousands of his employees couldn’t list the company’s name on their LinkedIn profiles—even though he’d picked a deliberately vague name, City Storage Systems, after initially considering “Super.”
Instead, he opted for “full underground, full stealth”—which posed challenges when hiring for the startup.
“With a name like City Storage Systems, people ask, ‘Do you just have boxes in parking lots?’” Kalanick said.
But he noted there are benefits to staying stealth for so long—including having, in his words, “the best recruiters in the world.”
Staying under the radar also draws a specific kind of employee and fosters a more progress-driven, selfless culture.
“When you build a culture around that, you end up with a culture of builders,” Kalanick explained. “You cultivate a team of people who want to create and don’t need fame for their work—that’s essentially emotional intelligence.”