Atoms, the new venture from Uber and CloudKitchens founder Travis Kalanick, has raised a $1.7 billion equity investment led by a16z, with Ben Horowitz joining the board, to build Industrial AI for entire economic sectors. The round unites Kalanick’s businesses under a single Atoms equity structure and is backed by a deep bench of equity and debt partners.
The raise marks the third act in a career-long thesis Kalanick calls “bits to atoms”: using software to understand, predict, and control the physical world.
The 16-year arc behind Atoms
For more than a decade and a half, Kalanick has worked to digitise physical industries by treating them as computers, where, in his framing, manufacturing is the processor, real estate is the storage, and transport is the network.
Uber came first, digitising transportation into a network for the physical world. CloudKitchens followed, focused on food production as a combination of manufacturing and real estate. Atoms is the next logical step: an OEM that builds these “atoms-based computers” for every major industrial sector.
What Atoms is building
Atoms positions itself at the center of what Kalanick calls the coming industrial revolution, in which large, atoms-heavy sectors get fully digitised. The company points to mining, construction, heavy transport, and food production as examples of multi-trillion-dollar industries ready for transformation over the next decade.
The engine for that shift is Industrial AI: systems of software, sensors, robotics, and AI used to automate the operations of entire industrial sectors. Where consumer AI has reshaped screens and information, Industrial AI aims at factories, supply chains, and the physical economy itself.
Who is backing the round
The investment is led by a16z, with co-founder Ben Horowitz taking a board seat. Kalanick framed the partnership as closing a loop that began in 2011, when he first tried to bring Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on board at Uber.
The full equity group includes:
- a16z (lead)
- Bain Capital
- Uber
- Fifth Wall
- Chemistry
- A*
- K5 Global
- Abstract
- SV Angel
- Alpha Square Group
Debt partners include Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Barclays, an unusually broad financing structure that reflects the capital intensity of building physical, industrial systems.
Why Industrial AI matters now
Atoms enters a moment when investor attention is shifting from software-only AI toward “physical AI,” systems that act in the real world through robotics, sensors, and automation. The scale of the opportunity is what makes it compelling: industrial sectors represent a vast share of global economic activity, yet remain among the least digitised.
If Kalanick’s thesis holds, the companies that build the operating systems for these industries could define the next decade of technology, much as consumer platforms defined the last one. Atoms is betting $1.7 billion, and one of the most closely watched founders in tech, that the age of atoms has arrived.