Industrial
ATOMS, a robotics startup led by former Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick, today said it has raised $1.7 billion in equity investment. The funding will enable ATOMS to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc Kalanick started at Uber and continued at CloudKitchens.
Kalanick hasn’t given many details about the robots the new company plans to build, but said ATOMS will act as an OEM that builds atoms-based computers for all major industrial sectors. As part of this investment, ATOMS merged its various businesses into one equity structure. Lead investors a16z and Ben Horowitz are joining the company’s board, with other equity partners including Bain Capital, Uber, Fifth Wall, Chemistry, A*, K5 Global, Abstract, SV Angel, and Alpha Square Group. Debt partners include Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Barclays.
ATOMS is essentially a rebranded holding company created on top of CloudKitchens. Now, the company aims to create physical automation to transform multiple industries.
To start, ATOMS said it aims to create better infrastructure for food, more productive mines, and a wheelbase for mobile robots. Kalanick wrote that humanoids will be good at handling low-scale tasks in human-designed spaces, but ATOMS is interested in making specialized robots that can do real work. The company aims to make gainfully employed robots that bring abundance to their owners and society at large.
Source: The Robot Report