Co-Founder of Uber Pivots Real Estate Company to Robots, Posts Manifesto

“The imperative 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 like to call Digitizing the Physical World.”

-Travis Kalanick

If you can parse the above excerpt, I’ve got wonderful news: Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick wrote about 1,700 words along similar lines to celebrate the transition of his real estate company into a new robot company called Atoms, dedicated to manufacturing robots that will perform tasks related to food infrastructure, mining, and transport.

As Bloomberg noted Friday, Kalanick has reportedly been in stealth mode for eight years, and taken on thousands of workers, apparently dedicated to turning his real estate company City Storage Systems into Atoms. City Storage Systems is noted for owning CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen company that famously saw a surge and decline during and after the Covid era.

Bloomberg’s story details the many disparate threads from Kalanick’s professional life that seem to be more or less converging 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 creator of Bowl Builder a system that appears to automate the creation of $20 lunch salads, and his investment in Pronto a self-driving dump truck company for the mining industry.

But that makes the company sound dreary and prosaic. It sounds much better when you read it in Kalanick’s words:

“Software has automated tasks of language and math, but the complete automation of the physical world – autonomy – remains largely untouched territory, the principal unlock to the next era of progress and abundance. History refers to this kind of moment of radical progress as a Golden Age.”

That’s more like it!

Last year, the Middle Eastern division of CloudKitchens hit some sort of snag that prevented it from executing a planned IPO and being listed on the stock exchanges of Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.