Atoms
Autonomous robots for industrial automation
Kitchen Ambassador
On-site role inside cloud kitchen facilities in Chicago; weekday lunch shifts.
About the job
- Ability to lift up to 30 pounds and remain on your feet during busy periods
- iPhone or Android smartphone
- Strong communication skills, in person and digital
- English proficiency required
- Comfort working in kitchen or food production environments
- Ability to stay organized and calm in a fast paced setting
- Experience in food service, kitchen operations, or logistics is helpful but not required
- Coordinate directly with kitchen operators to receive completed orders
- Verify, sort, and stage orders accurately for courier pickup
- Move orders to designated pickup zones and delivery racks
- Ensure orders are labeled, organized, and ready on time
- Act as the primary Picnic point of contact for kitchen staff
- Communicate real time updates between kitchens, drivers, and Picnic operations
- Maintain clean, organized, and efficient staging areas
- Support daily kitchen operations during lunch rush
- Identify bottlenecks or issues and escalate as needed
- Help onboard and support courier drivers at the kitchen level
- Provide feedback to operations leadership on kitchen workflow improvements
- Leadership opportunity: leadership ability may lead to shift coordination, kitchen training support, or driver flow management
- Leadership ability is a strong plus
- Experience in food service, kitchen operations, or logistics is helpful but not required
- Leadership experience or interest is a plus
About the company
Atoms builds specialized autonomous machines for industrial work, focusing on driving labor productivity in sectors like logistics, food operations, mining, and industrial transport. It develops an integrated robotics stack that includes autonomous mobility systems, sensors, and fleet management software to enable robots to navigate facilities, move goods, and execute operational workflows while gathering data to improve efficiency over time. Unlike many firms that sell generic robots, Atoms targets structured environments with “gainfully employed robots”—task-specific, economically valuable automation that can be deployed across multiple facilities through a shared hardware-software-infrastructure platform, ensuring consistent performance and scalability. The company’s goal is to replace repetitive manual labor with continuous, autonomous systems, helping industries address labor shortages and rising costs by making robotics a core infrastructure for physical work.
Company Size
N/A
Company Stage
Late Stage VC
Total Funding
$1.7B
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Founded
2026
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Atoms raised $1.7 billion on July 22, 2026, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
- Uber invested $100 million and discussed using Atoms robotaxi technology on its network.
- Atoms is hiring aggressively; its careers page listed 91 roles by August 2026.
What critics are saying
- Robotaxi exploration announced September 6, 2026 drags Atoms into Tesla, Waymo, and Cruise competition.
- Industrial robotics burns capital; integrating CloudKitchens and Pronto raises execution risk across multiple businesses.
- A product failure or autonomy incident could stall permitting, customers, and the entire Atoms platform.
What makes Atoms unique
- Atoms pairs robotics hardware with industrial software across mining, logistics, and transportation.
- Travis Kalanick folded CloudKitchens, Pronto, and Atoms under one capital structure on July 22, 2026.
- Vikas Chandra joined September 2026 to build foundation models for physical-world perception.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Disability Insurance
Life Insurance
Health Savings Account/Flexible Spending Account
Unlimited Paid Time Off
Paid Holidays
Paid Sick Leave
Parental Leave
Commuter Benefits
Company Equity
Company News
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."
Neptune expands AI and robotics exposure with strategic investment in Atoms. Vancouver, British Columbia - August 27, 2026 - Neptune Digital Assets Corp. (TSXV: NDA) (OTCQB: NPPTF) (FSE: 1NW) ("Neptune" or the "Company") is pleased to announce an investment in Atoms, an artificial intelligence and robotics company led by Travis Kalanick, co-founder and former CEO of Uber Technologies Inc. ("Uber"). Atoms is developing intelligent machines and automation systems designed to perform productive work across the physical economy, with applications spanning transportation, mining, food production and other large industrial markets. "AI is rapidly moving beyond software and into the physical world, creating opportunities to transform some of the world's largest industries," said Cale Moodie, President and CEO of Neptune. "Atoms combines an exceptional founder with the technical ambition and capital required to pursue these opportunities at scale. For Neptune shareholders, this investment provides exposure to a high-quality private technology company at an important stage in its development." Neptune's US$500,000 investment was made as part of Atoms' previously announced US$1.7 billion financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz. The investment was completed on an arm's-length basis. The investment builds on Neptune's strategy of complementing its core digital asset operations with selective investments in private technology companies. The Company continues to evaluate opportunities across artificial intelligence, computing and other emerging technologies. About Neptune Digital Assets Corp. Neptune Digital Assets Corp. (TSXV:NDA) (OTCQB:NPPTF) (FSE:1NW) is one of the first publicly traded blockchain companies in Canada and is at the forefront of the cryptocurrency and blockchain landscape. Neptune engages in operations across the digital asset ecosystem including, proof-of-stake mining, blockchain nodes, decentralized finance (DeFi) and other associated cutting-edge technology. Its unwavering commitment to innovation and strategic growth enables Neptune Digital Assets Corp to continually explore new opportunities and maximize value for its shareholders. For more information about Neptune Digital Assets Corp., please visit its website at www.neptunedigitalassets.com or follow Neptune Digital Assets Corp on X (@NeptuneDAC). ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD Cale Moodie, President and CEO Neptune Digital Assets Corp. 1-800-545-0941 www.neptunedigitalassets.com Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements This release contains certain "forward-looking statements" and certain "forward-looking information" as defined under applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information can generally be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may", "will", "expect", "intend", "estimate", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "plans", "proposes" or similar terminology. Forward-looking statements and information in this release include, among others: statements regarding the anticipated benefits of the investment in Atoms, including expected exposure for Neptune shareholders to a private technology company; statements regarding Atoms' business plans and prospects, including the development and commercialization of intelligent machines and automation systems and their application across transportation, mining, food production and other industrial markets; statements regarding the potential for artificial intelligence to be applied within large industrial sectors; statements regarding Neptune's strategy of complementing its digital asset operations with investments in private technology companies; and statements regarding Neptune's continued evaluation of additional investment opportunities in artificial intelligence, computing and other emerging technologies. Forward-looking statements and information are based on forecasts of future results, estimates of amounts not yet determinable and assumptions that, while believed by management to be reasonable, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties, and contingencies. Forward-looking statements and information are subject to various known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the ability of the Company to control or predict, that may cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied thereby, and are developed based on assumptions about such risks, uncertainties and other factors set out herein, including but not limited to: the growth and profitability of the investment in Atoms; the inherent risks involved in the cryptocurrency and general securities markets; the Company may not be able to profitably liquidate its current digital currency inventory, or at all; a decline in digital currency prices may have a significant negative impact on the Company's operations; the volatility of digital currency prices; uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future; the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses, currency fluctuations; regulatory restrictions, liability, competition, loss of key employees and other related risks and uncertainties. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking information except as required by applicable law. Such forward-looking information represents management's best judgment based on information currently available. No forward-looking statement can be guaranteed and actual future results may vary materially. Accordingly, readers are advised not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information. Back to all news
Travis Kalanick says he wouldn't do 'anything different' about the missed Uber-Lyft acquisition. Aug 16, 2026, 10:21 PM PT Uber and Lyft were just not meant to be, says Travis Kalanick. In an Andreessen Horowitz interview released on Friday, the former Uber CEO said he has no regrets about how he handled a potential acquisition of Lyft. "I wouldn't do anything different. And it's easy to say now, but I got a lot of shit for that for a long time," he said. "I would sit across the table from the guys, and it was just clear that we were very culturally different." Uber held acquisition talks to buy its rival Lyft in 2014. The negotiations fell apart because Kalanick refused to pay more than $2 billion, while Lyft was seeking a higher valuation. In Friday's interview, Kalanick said that cultural mismatch was a problem too, and it started with Lyft's pink mustache effort. In 2012, Lyft introduced a giant plush pink mustache on its car grilles to make its vehicles instantly recognizable and reinforce a playful brand that contrasted with taxis and Uber. The quirky "carstache" fit Lyft's image of ride-hailing as a social experience, but it became less suitable as the company sought business customers. Lyft began moving away from the oversize mustache around 2014, replacing it with subtler, more practical ways to identify the correct car. The former Uber CEO, who recently launched robotics company Atoms, said that he had wanted the Lyft acquisition to go through. "When you meet with somebody, and you're going to acquire them, there's so much goodness that could come from it," he said. He added that he wanted it to work because Uber was spending an "insane amount of money" trying to compete with Lyft for market share and price. Kalanick resigned as Uber CEO in June 2017 following months of turmoil at the company, after which major investors demanded his removal. Dara Khosrowshahi was appointed CEO later that year, with a mandate to remake Uber's culture and prepare the company for an eventual public listing. Still, on Friday, Kalanick said: "I'd stand by every decision I made at Uber." In March, Kalanick rebranded an earlier venture as Atoms, an industrial AI company automating food, mining, and transportation with robotics. Atoms announced a $1.7 billion equity funding round in July 2026, led by A16z, with participation from Bain Capital and Fifth Wall. A16z's Ben Horowitz joined Atoms' board as part of the deal.