Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, has a new company called Atoms that builds robots for industries like mining and transportation. Atoms has hired Gautam Gupta as its chief financial officer, the person in charge of managing a company's money and financial planning. Gupta announced the move on social media on Wednesday, August 5, 2026. TechCrunch

The hire brings Gupta and Kalanick back together almost ten years after they both worked at Uber. Gupta first invested in Uber in 2012 while working as a vice president at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, then joined Uber in 2013. He stayed for more than four years before leaving in July 2017, just weeks after Kalanick resigned as CEO. After Uber, Gupta spent three years at Opendoor, a real estate company, before co-founding a venture capital firm called A* in 2020. He is now leaving A* to join Atoms, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Atoms used to be called City Storage Systems, and before that it was known as CloudKitchens. Kalanick renamed it Atoms in March 2026 as he shifted the company's focus to robotics. CNBC Kalanick has said he wants Atoms to work across three areas: mining, food, and transportation. The company is organized into separate units, like Atoms Food, which builds infrastructure for the food industry, and Atoms Mining, which focuses on making mines more productive. Reuters

The CFO hiring comes after Atoms raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, a major venture capital firm, in July 2026. Uber also joined the round, investing $100 million. That figure was first reported by The Information and confirmed by TechCrunch. Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, will join Atoms' board of directors. TechCrunch

Earlier in 2026, Atoms bought a company called Pronto, which makes software that lets mining trucks operate without human drivers. Pronto is run by Anthony Levandowski, a well-known engineer who worked on self-driving cars at both Uber and Google. He and Kalanick have a complicated history tied to a major lawsuit between Uber and Google's parent company over stolen trade secrets, something widely known in the tech industry.

What is taking shape at Atoms is a clear pattern. Kalanick is pulling together people he worked with at Uber and directing money toward robots that can do dangerous or labor-heavy jobs in specific industries like mining and food service. Gupta's experience managing finances at Uber, a company that grew extremely fast, is now being applied to a robotics business that requires large amounts of upfront investment. Uber's $100 million investment also ties Kalanick's new company to the one he originally co-founded.

The open question is whether Atoms can pull this off. Kalanick's strategy is to build separate, focused robotics teams for each industry rather than trying to create one general-purpose robot system that could serve many industries. That is a bet that going deep in one area at a time is better than going wide. The $1.7 billion gives the company time, and buying Pronto brought self-driving mining technology in-house. Whether all of that translates into robots that actually get deployed across multiple industries at the same time is the real test ahead.