In July, Travis Kalanick’s new company, Atoms, raised $1.7 billion led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Ben Horowitz called it the biggest check he has ever written. Uber, the company that pushed Kalanick out in 2017, put in a reported $100 million.
How we own it
We didn’t invest in Atoms directly. We own our stake through another fund we invested in.
Atoms doesn’t sell shares to the public and rarely to new investors. But that fund got in, and we bought into the fund.
If Atoms ever lists, USVC's evergreen structure means no forced exit. We can hold or harvest into the liquidity sleeve that supports our quarterly repurchase offers, at the Board’s discretion.
The Kalanick story
Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009 and ran it to roughly 20,000 employees before resigning as CEO in June 2017 amid investigations into the company’s workplace culture.
Then Kalanick seemingly disappeared. For eight years he ran a company called City Storage Systems, deliberately named to be boring.
Employees were even told not to list it on LinkedIn to maintain secrecy.
Under local brand names in 30 countries, it built more than 500 commercial kitchen facilities for delivery-only restaurants. Most people knew it as CloudKitchens.
In March 2026, City Storage Systems became Atoms.
What is Atoms?
A computer has three parts: a CPU that manipulates bits, storage that holds bits, a network that moves bits.
The physical world has a comparable three: manufacturing manipulates atoms, real estate stores them, transport moves them.
“Everything you see was either grown or mined, manufactured and moved,” Kalanick says.
Uber digitized one piece of one industry. Atoms is trying to digitize whole industries at the same time.
Kalanick calls it industrial AI: software, sensors, robotics, and machinery to automate an entire sector.
Atoms operates as three business units under one company and one board:
Food. The CloudKitchens base, now adding robotic food production and autonomous delivery. The economic test: can a prepared, delivered meal cost about the same as buying groceries? The first robotics manufacturing line is projected for Q4 2026.
Mining. Built on Pronto (the autonomy company founded by Kalanick’s former Uber self-driving lead Anthony Levandowski) acquired in March, it retrofits existing haul trucks with autonomy kits. Kalanick says the technology has crossed human-equivalent productivity and demand now exceeds installation capacity. His pitch to mine owners: 20% more gold per year.
Transport. Autonomous ground vehicles, built in-house because Kalanick believe he can’t depend on outside autonomy vendors. Eric Meyhofer, who ran Uber’s self-driving group, leads the robotics work. Recent reports have also revealed Atoms may be in talks with Uber to supply robotaxi technology.
Why Atoms may be bigger than Uber
Uber won what Kalanick calls the gold medal: ride-hailing.
He argues transport is full of silver medals, each a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. Food delivery, parcels, trucking, off-road autonomy.
Atoms seems to be going after the silver medals while also owning the kitchens and the mines.
Ben Horowitz’s thesis: heavy industry will be automated by specialized machines, not humanoids, and Kalanick may be best-positioned to build them.
Kalanick’s own benchmark is Elon Musk, whom he calls the best in the world at industrial AI. Asked where he stands in comparison, he said: “I’m a baby goat.”
The bull case is that the CloudKitchens decade a the proof of concept. Kalanick built a real operating business across 30 countries with no press, then used it as the foundation to enhance mining and transport with the Uber engineering bench reassembled.
Owning Atoms
There doesn't seem to be a way for the general public to own Atoms today. It hasn’t disclosed an IPO price, has no ticker, and its investors are mostly a short list of institutions.
Kalanick took Uber from a $4 million first round to a company worth $68 billion before his departure.
Atoms is running a similiar playbook with more capital and three industries of focus instead of one.
USVC has exposure today, as well to Supabase (12.2%), Mercury (11.9%), Anthropic (0.6%), and more, in a registered fund open to U.S. investors from $500.
— Ankur
For important disclosures and USVC holdings, see https://usvc.com/portfolio.
P.S. At 2pm ET, I'm co-hosting a free live session about venture investing from your retirement account with Mat Sorensen of Directed IRA.
What we'll cover:
How a self-directed IRA can access exposure to startups, funds, and private companies
The IRA rules to understand before a single retirement dollar goes into a private deal
Why venture may have been so hard for individual investors to reach, and what's changing
Why a Roth can be a good tax wrapper for anything long-horizon or illiquid
Live Q&A with Mat & me!
It’s free to attend, and a recording will be sent to everyone who registers.
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