Unfinished Business: Kalanick's Atoms Is Building Robotaxi Tech With Uber's $100M Quietly in the Round

Nine years after a trade-secrets scandal helped push him out of the company he founded, Travis Kalanick is reportedly coming back for the technology that started it all. A Financial Times investigation published Sunday, September 6, reveals that Atoms — Kalanick’s holding company, fresh off a $1.7 billion round led by Andreessen Horowitz — is developing robotaxi technology. And the most striking detail buried in the report: Uber, the company that ousted him, quietly put $100 million into the venture.

What the FT found

The FT’s Rafe Rosner-Uddin, citing people familiar with the plans plus interviews with current and former Atoms and Uber staff, reports that Atoms is preparing for a hiring spree, including potential acquisitions, to bring in autonomous-vehicle engineering talent and become a major player in the industry.

Leading that effort is Anthony Levandowski — the engineer who co-founded Waymo, ran Uber’s self-driving program, and whose theft of Google’s trade secrets triggered a lawsuit that the FT estimates cost Uber close to $350 million and contributed directly to Kalanick’s 2017 removal as chief executive. He was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison before being pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2021.

Levandowski arrived at Atoms through its March acquisition of Pronto, his autonomous-haulage startup focused on heavy industry and mining. At the time, the deal looked like a bolt-on for Atoms’ industrial-automation ambitions. In retrospect, it was the tidiest on-ramp to passenger autonomy money could buy.

Uber’s $100 million counterweight

The investment figure is the story’s sharpest irony. Uber participated in Atoms’ $1.7 billion summer round — a fact TechCrunch confirmed in July — but the size of its cheque is only now public: $100 million, per the FT. Atoms even lists Uber among the equity partners on its own investor page, alongside a16z, Bain Capital Ventures, Fifth Wall, and SV Angel, with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs among five debt partners.

The FT goes further: the two companies have held preliminary talks about Uber using Atoms’ robotaxi technology on its ride-hailing network. Uber declined to comment.

The chain of events deserves to be stated slowly. An engineer took files from Google, joined Uber, and triggered litigation that helped remove Uber’s founder. Nine years on, Uber is a shareholder in the company that employs that engineer — run by the founder it removed. In Silicon Valley’s memory, grudges apparently expire faster than equity.

Atoms denies it — sort of

Asked about the robotaxi plans, Atoms gave the FT a flat denial, describing itself as “an industrial software company” with “no plans to enter the saturated robotaxi market.” Yet the same statement added that Uber is a partner and may use Atoms technology for its ridesharing business if that proves helpful. That is a materially narrower claim than the denial preceding it, and the two sit oddly together.

The framing may be strategic rather than false. Sources emphasized that robotaxis don’t represent the entirety of Atoms’ plans, and the company’s own essay announcing the a16z round — titled “Unfinished Business” — describes a sixteen-year project to digitize the physical world, running from Uber through CloudKitchens to Atoms. It talks about industrial AI, mining, and construction. It does not mention robotaxis once. But it closes with three words that read differently today: “time to close the loop.”

The old bench, reassembled

Kalanick has been methodically rebuilding his Uber alumni network. Gautam Gupta, Uber’s former finance chief, serves as Atoms’ CFO. Eric Meyhofer, who took over Uber’s self-driving effort after Levandowski left, now runs Lab37 — the arm automating commercial kitchens — and has hired several dozen former Uber staff while recruiting from Zoox, Tesla, and Waymo. Atoms now counts more than 2,000 employees across its divisions, with most in the food business but a growing share on autonomous vehicles.

The model the FT describes matches Wayve and Nuro: build the autonomy software and let partners handle the vehicles. It is an asset-light path into a market that Waymo, Tesla, and a wave of Chinese operators are spending billions to saturate — which may explain Atoms’ reluctance to wear the “robotaxi company” label publicly.

Why Uber is hedging

Uber, for its part, is funding several routes to the same destination simultaneously. It cut about 3,300 jobs on September 2 — roughly a tenth of its workforce — while pulling out of Nigeria and Uganda. In the same month it launched London’s first robotaxi service with Wayve and agreed in August to put more than 2,000 Pony.ai robotaxis on European streets. A $100 million position in Kalanick’s venture, with an option to license its stack, is one more lottery ticket in a portfolio designed to ensure Uber owns the demand layer no matter whose autonomy wins.

The personal dimension is hard to miss. Dara Khosrowshahi and Kalanick stay in regular contact, the FT reports, and appeared together at a US-Saudi business summit in Riyadh in May 2025 while discussing a deal involving Pony.ai’s American arm — talks that ultimately fizzled. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is also among Atoms’ backers.

The rehabilitation of Travis Kalanick

Perhaps the most telling signal is cultural. Kalanick, who left Uber’s board in 2019 amid allegations of managerial dysfunction and regulatory investigations, now speaks at a16z events. Ben Horowitz, who joined Atoms’ board, told one such event the investment was “certainly the biggest cheque I’ve ever written,” and praised the meritocratic, toe-stepping culture Kalanick built at Uber as the part that got diluted after his departure.

Kalanick himself told the a16z audience that things which would have happened at Uber over time are things he is doing now — and that when you fall in love again, you do not think about the ex very much. The ex, in this telling, just bought a $100 million seat at the wedding.

Whether Atoms formally enters the robotaxi market or keeps serving autonomy through industrial side doors, the FT’s reporting makes one thing clear: the two men at the center of Uber’s most damaging chapter are rebuilding the stack that caused it — this time with the company’s blessing, and its money.