“The essential is movement and action in the physical world with a software-like perspective on physical automation – think of it as treating atoms like bits or what we call digitizing the physical world.”
-Travis Kalanick
If you can parse the excerpt above, I’ve got amazing news: Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick wrote nearly 1,700 words to celebrate the transformation of his real estate company into a new robot company called Atoms, dedicated to building robots that will perform tasks related to food infrastructure, mining, and transportation.
As Bloomberg noted on Friday, Kalanick has reportedly been in stealth mode for eight years, and has hired thousands of employees, apparently dedicated to turning his real estate company City Storage Systems into Atoms. City Storage Systems is known for owning CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen company that famously saw a rise and fall during and after the Covid era.
The Bloomberg story details several different aspects of Kalanick’s professional life that seem to more or less coincide with Atoms: his ambition to bring self-driving cars to Uber before he was forced to resign from that company, his longtime partnership with the maker of Bowl Builder, which appears to automate the creation of $20 lunch salads, and a self-driving dump truck company for the mining industry. His investment in Pronto.
But this makes the company seem dull and boring. It sounds a lot better when you read it in Kalanick’s own words:
“Software has automated functions of language and mathematics, but full automation of the physical world – autonomy – is largely untouched territory, the key unlock for the next era of progress and abundance. History refers to such a moment of fundamental progress as the Golden Age.”
This is what happened!
Last year, CloudKitchens’ Middle Eastern division ran into some sort of blockage that prevented it from executing a planned IPO and getting listed on the stock exchanges of Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.
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