Kalanick's Atoms Circles Robotaxis, Then Denies It

Travis Kalanick, who built Uber and then left it under pressure, may be edging back toward the business that made his name. TechCrunch reported on 6 September that Atoms, the company Kalanick now runs, has held early talks with Uber about supplying robotaxi technology for its ride-hailing network. Uber has already put 100 million dollars into the venture.

Kalanick describes Atoms as a physical AI company, a label that has become shorthand for firms trying to move machine learning off the screen and into machines that act in the world. The company raised about 1.7 billion dollars earlier this summer in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and it has been hiring and buying its way toward the expertise that autonomy demands.

Building the bench

One purchase stands out. Atoms acquired Pronto, an autonomous-driving startup led by Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who once ran Uber's self-driving program before a long and public legal fight over trade secrets. Bringing Levandowski's group in gives Atoms a core of people who have worked on real autonomous systems, not slideware.

So the pieces look like a robotaxi play: money from Uber, a founder who knows ride-hailing better than almost anyone, and a team with autonomy experience. Then the company said the opposite.

The denial

Asked directly, Atoms called itself an industrial software company with no plans to enter what it described as the saturated robotaxi market. Both things can be true at once. A company can build and license the software that drives a car without ever running a fleet of its own, which would let it sell into Uber and others rather than compete with them.

The gap between the reporting and the denial is the story for now. Robotaxis have moved from demo to daily service in a handful of cities, and the field is drawing both capital and scrutiny, from Waymo's expansion to the regulators already auditing Tesla's Cybercab. Whether Atoms wants to drive the car or just write the code that does, Kalanick is once again standing near the intersection he knows best.