Kalanick is building robotaxis, and Uber put $100 million into it

Travis Kalanick called the $1.7 billion his robotics company raised this summer unfinished business. The Financial Times has now reported what that phrase covers: Atoms is preparing hiring and acquisitions to move into autonomous vehicles, and it has talked to Uber about the ride-hailing platform using its robotaxi technology.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round. Uber put in $100 million of its own.

“Unfinished business.”

— Travis Kalanick, founder of Atoms, TechCrunch, 6 September 2026

Quote source: TechCrunch, 6 September 2026

The Kalanick robotaxi cast list

Uber removed Kalanick as chief executive in 2017. The company is now a shareholder in the robotaxi venture he is building, and a potential customer of it. That alone would make the story worth a paragraph. The next fact makes it a different story.

Atoms acquired Pronto, an autonomous mining startup previously run by Anthony Levandowski. Levandowski led Uber's self-driving programme after Uber bought his truck company Otto for $680 million, and he is the reason Waymo sued Uber. He had taken more than 14,000 files from Google on his way out.

That case ended in February 2018 with Uber handing Waymo equity worth $245 million. Waymo had asked for $1.9 billion. Levandowski was later convicted of stealing trade secrets and sentenced to 18 months, then pardoned by President Trump.

What the arrangement looks like

So the arrangement now reads like this. The founder Uber pushed out is building robotaxis. The engineer whose file transfer cost Uber $245 million ran a company Atoms just bought. Uber has invested in the result and is discussing putting the technology on its network.

Nothing about that is illegal, and Silicon Valley recycles people faster than most industries. It does say something about how thin the bench is. Autonomy is hard enough that the people who did it early stay employable regardless of what happened next, which is why the pardon and the conviction sit in the same paragraph as a $1.7 billion round.

Why Uber is paying for it

The commercial logic on Uber's side is simple. It abandoned in-house autonomy in 2020 and has been renting access to other people's stacks since, so a $100 million stake in a supplier is cheap optionality. The logic on Kalanick's side is the phrase he used himself.

Watch for the acquisitions rather than the announcements. Atoms has money and a mining-autonomy team, and neither of those puts a car on a city street. Capital keeps moving toward the people who already built the hard part, as it did when Nvidia went shopping for Perplexity, and the argument about who gets displaced by all this stays somewhere else.

None of this should be read as personalized investment advice.