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Travis Kalanick's Atoms hires Vikas Chandra from Meta's smart glasses team. Travis Kalanick's robotics company Atoms has hired Vikas Chandra, Meta's longtime smart glasses AI lead, as its new VP of artificial intelligence. Chandra will build the foundation models that help Atoms' autonomous systems perceive and operate in food logistics, mining, and transportation. Travis Kalanick's robotics company Atoms has hired Vikas Chandra, who spent nearly eight years running AI for Meta's smart glasses, to build the foundation models that let its machines understand the physical world. Atoms just made its most pointed hire yet. Travis Kalanick's industrial robotics company brought in Vikas Chandra as its new vice president of artificial intelligence. He's arriving from Meta's Reality Labs, where he spent close to eight years leading the AI work behind Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Chandra's job at Atoms is to build foundation models that help autonomous machines perceive and operate in warehouses, mines, and kitchens, not just headsets. The hire matters because of who Chandra is, not just where he's from. He joined Meta in 2018 as director of applied machine learning. He rose to senior director, then distinguished scientist, running the team that packed AI onto tiny, power-constrained chips. That's what let a pair of glasses recognize objects, translate speech, and answer questions without draining the battery in an hour. Before Meta, he led applied machine learning at Arm Research, where he helped pioneer TinyML, the field of squeezing neural networks onto devices too small and too power-starved for a data center GPU. He holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon and has authored more than 200 research papers. That's a serious resume. That's exactly the skill set robots need. The bet behind the hire. Atoms itself only became public information this year, emerging from stealth in March. The company grew out of City Storage Systems, the ghost-kitchen operator Kalanick built after leaving Uber in 2017. It spent roughly eight years running quietly before surfacing under the Atoms name. It has since folded in CloudKitchens and acquired Pronto, the autonomous mining firm run by former Uber self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski. The pitch, as Kalanick has described it, is a "wheelbase for robots": one shared stack of sensors and software, driven by AI. That stack is meant to move across industries - food logistics, mining, transportation - instead of being rebuilt from scratch for each one. Travis Kalanick's industrial AI company Atoms raised $1.7 billion in an a16z-led round announced July 22, with Uber itself joining as an investor and Ben Horowitz taking a board seat. The deal merges Kalanick's CloudKitchens, Pronto mining automation, and transport businesses into a single equity structure, built around a contrarian thesis that... - Travis Kalanick raises 1.7 billion Atoms - specialized industrial robots funding round Chandra isn't the only person leaving a comfortable perch at a tech giant for the harder, dirtier problem of physical AI. Atoms has also brought on Gautam Gupta, a former Uber finance executive, as chief financial officer, assembling a leadership bench that reads like an Uber alumni reunion. That's a deliberate strategy: recruit people who already know how to run an operationally brutal, capital-intensive business, then point that experience at robots instead of ride-hailing. The money backing the bet is real. Atoms closed a $1.7 billion round in July, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz taking a board seat. Bain Capital Ventures, Uber itself, Fifth Wall, and several other funds joined in. That places Atoms in the same conversation as Figure AI, which raised more than $1 billion last year at a valuation approaching $39 billion, and Physical Intelligence. Both are chasing the same wager: the next big AI platform can pick things up and haul ore out of the ground, far from any chat window. Beyond kitchens and mines. There's a fourth industry now in play, too. TechCrunch reported on September 6 that Atoms is exploring a move into robotaxis. That would put Chandra's perception work to the test in the highest-stakes environment a machine can operate in: a public road, full of people who did not agree to be part of the experiment. The difference is what Atoms does next. Figure and Physical Intelligence are building humanoid robots and general-purpose robot brains meant to handle almost any task. Atoms is betting narrower, and more useful in the near term: food delivery kitchens, mining trucks, freight. Chandra's job is to give those systems the kind of perception that made Ray-Ban Meta glasses work in the real world. It's built for machines that don't get to ask a human for help when the model gets confused. Chandra now reports into a company chasing three industries at once - food logistics, mining, transportation. The hiring pace suggests Kalanick is building out the team well before he's finished proving the product. Travis Kalanick's industrial robotics company Atoms raised $1.7 billion led by a16z on July 22, 2026, one of the largest robotics rounds of the year. The company, which operated in stealth for nearly eight years, spans autonomous mining, logistics, and food robotics across 110+ cities. The raise signals a major bet on physical AI infrastructure at... - Travis Kalanick Atoms robotics company funding - a16z physical AI robot startup Join the discussion. No replies yet. Start the discussion. 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Travis Kalanick's robotics startup Atoms has hired Vikas Chandra, a longtime Meta AI executive, as vice president of AI. Chandra previously led AI work for Meta's smart glasses and will now build "foundation models for the physical world" — AI systems designed to help machines understand and act in real-world environments. Atoms, which is developing robots for industries including food, mining, and transportation, raised $1.7 billion earlier this summer in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The startup absorbed Kalanick's ghost-kitchen venture CloudKitchens as a subsidiary. Chandra's appointment follows other high-profile hires, including former Uber finance chief Gautam Gupta as CFO. The company also acquired autonomous-mining startup Pronto, run by former Uber self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski.

Uber co-founder eyes return to ride-hailing with atoms startup. By PYMNTS | September 6, 2026 Uber's co-founder is reportedly considering returning to the ride-hailing space with his new venture Atoms. That's according to a report Sunday (Sept. 6) by the Financial Times (FT), which said Travis Kalanick is looking to develop robotaxi technology by reuniting with veterans of Uber's autonomous vehicles team in a bid to achieve a decade-old goal. Thanks to a recent $1.7 billion funding round, Atoms is about to embark on a hiring spree to bring on autonomous engineering talent, sources familiar with Kalanick's plans told FT. Atoms, which Kalanick has described as a "physical AI" company, has also held early talks with Uber about using its technology for robotaxis on its ride-hailing network, these sources said. They added that Uber has invested $100 million in Atoms. A tie-up would be Kalanick's first involvement in ride-hailing at Uber since he left its board in 2019, the report said. He was forced out as CEO in 2017 after an independent investigation into Uber's handling of sexual harassment complaints criticized the company and recommended Kalanick step back. Please add Mappedin to your preferred sources list so its news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks! "A lot of the things that would have happened with Uber over time are things we're doing now," Kalanick said this month at an event hosted by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz in San Francisco, per FT. The report said it interviewed several current and former Atoms and Uber employees about Kalanick's return to the ride-hailing space after nearly a decade on the sidelines. Uber declined to comment for FT, while Atoms said it is "an industrial software company focused [on] industrial applications." "We have no plans to enter the saturated robotaxi market. Uber is a partner of Atoms and can use our technology for its ridesharing business if it is helpful," the company added. PYMNTS has contacted Uber for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. Sources added that Kalanick has tapped Waymo co-founder/former Uber self-driving chief Anthony Levandowski to oversee Atoms' autonomous vehicle work. In announcing the $1.7 billion funding round in July, Kalanick said that "industrial AI," which covers software, sensors, robotics and AI used to automate operations, would power the next Industrial Revolution. "Mining, construction, heavy transport, food production are just a few examples of atoms-heavy industries awaiting massive digital transformation," he said. "Multiple trillion-dollar industries rapidly transforming over the next decade powering an engine of prosperity unparalleled in human history."