{"slug": "travis-kalanick-s-robotics-startup-taps-meta-veteran-for-top-ai-role", "title": "Travis Kalanick's robotics startup taps Meta veteran for top AI role", "summary": "Vikas Chandra, a longtime Meta AI executive who led AI work for the company's smart glasses, announced Monday he is joining Travis Kalanick's robotics startup Atoms as vice president of AI. At Atoms, Chandra said he will build \"foundation models for the physical world,\" adding that \"for 8 years my job was making models small enough and fast enough to live on AI glasses.\" Atoms, which raised $1.7 billion earlier this summer in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, says it is building robots for industries including food, mining, and transportation.", "body_md": "[Travis Kalanick's](https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-atoms-uber-humanoid-robots-golden-age-2026-3) new [robotics startup, Atoms](https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-ex-uber-misfits-entering-robotics-game-atoms-2026-3), has scooped up a high-profile hire.\n\nVikas Chandra, a longtime Meta AI executive who led AI work for the company's smart glasses, announced Monday that he is joining the startup as vice president of AI.\n\nAt Atoms, Chandra said he will build \"foundation models for the physical world\" — AI systems designed to help machines understand and act in real-world environments.\n\n\"For 8 years my job was making models small enough and fast enough to live on AI glasses,\" Chandra wrote on X. \"The physical world is a harder version of the same problem.\"\n\nAtoms and Chandra did not respond to requests for comment.\n\nAtoms, which has revealed few details about its work, says it is building robots for industries including food, mining, and transportation. Kalanick, who co-founded Uber in 2009 but resigned under investor pressure in 2017, publicly unveiled Atoms earlier this year after years of operating in stealth. Atoms absorbed Kalanick's ghost-kitchen venture, CloudKitchens, as a subsidiary.\n\nThe company raised $1.7 billion earlier this summer in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz to pursue what Kalanick called \"a journey to digitize the physical world.\"\n\n\"On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business,\" Kalanick wrote on X during the announcement. \"Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens, and will now finish at Atoms.\"\n\nChandra's arrival is the latest in a string of prominent hires at Atoms.\n\nLast month, former Uber finance chief Gautam Gupta joined the startup as chief financial officer. Earlier this year, Atoms acquired autonomous-mining startup Pronto, which is run by former Uber self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski. Several former Uber employees also work at Atoms, according to LinkedIn.\n\n*Have a tip? Contact Rya Jetha via email at* __rjetha@businessinsider.com__ *or Signal at rjetha.07. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device;* __here's our guide__ *to sharing information securely.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/travis-kalanick-s-robotics-startup-taps-meta-veteran-for-top-ai-role", "canonical_source": "https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-robotics-startup-taps-meta-veteran-top-ai-role-2026-9", "published_at": "2026-09-15 00:44:48+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-15 01:00:01.151829+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["robotics", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["Atoms", "Vikas Chandra", "Meta", "Travis Kalanick", "Uber", "CloudKitchens", "Andreessen Horowitz", "Pronto"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/travis-kalanick-s-robotics-startup-taps-meta-veteran-for-top-ai-role", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/travis-kalanick-s-robotics-startup-taps-meta-veteran-for-top-ai-role.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/travis-kalanick-s-robotics-startup-taps-meta-veteran-for-top-ai-role.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/travis-kalanick-s-robotics-startup-taps-meta-veteran-for-top-ai-role.jsonld"}}