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.
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Travis Kalanick closes a $1.7 billion round for Atoms as a16z bets big on physical AI 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
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