Travis Kalanick is rebuilding his old inner circle – this time for robots. Gautam Gupta, who served as Kalanick’s finance chief during Uber’s most turbulent years, announced Wednesday that he has joined Kalanick’s robotics and industrial AI startup Atoms as chief financial officer, just weeks after the company closed a $1.7 billion funding round.
We in NEWSCENTRAL note that Gupta’s arrival fits a broader pattern rather than a one-off hire. Gupta spent more than four years at Uber before leaving in July 2017, just weeks after Kalanick was forced to resign as chief executive amid a wave of harassment and discrimination complaints. Hiring him now continues Kalanick’s effort to reassemble key members of his original Uber team at his new venture.
‘Bringing back people who already know how you operate is a deliberate strategy in robotics, not just sentiment,’ said Liam Cortez, Visual Systems Analyst. ‘Hardware and autonomy programs move slowly enough that institutional trust and shared shorthand between executives can matter as much as raw talent – you don’t want to be building that rapport from zero while you’re also trying to ship physical products.’
Earlier this year, Atoms acquired mining autonomy startup Pronto, run by Anthony Levandowski, another former Uber – and former Google – self-driving engineer. According to public LinkedIn profiles, a number of former senior Uber employees who worked closely with Kalanick are now at Atoms, which was previously known as CloudKitchens before it pivoted toward robotics and industrial AI.
We at NEWSCENTRAL view Kalanick’s own framing of the venture as revealing. ‘On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business,’ he wrote when announcing the funding last month. ‘Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens, and will now finish at Atoms.’ Kalanick has said he wants the company to focus on mining, food and transportation, describing the mission as an effort to ‘go up against the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change.’
‘Mining, food and transportation sound unrelated on paper, but they share one thing – all three depend on physical operations that are expensive to automate and even more expensive to get wrong,’ said Jessica Kline, Automotive Industry Analyst. ‘That’s exactly the kind of environment where a founder who’s comfortable moving fast and absorbing regulatory friction can have an edge, for better or worse.’
Perhaps the most striking detail is who else joined the funding round: Uber itself, reuniting the ride-hailing giant with the founder it pushed out in 2017. The company has not disclosed the size of its investment, though outside estimates have put the figure at roughly $100 million.
As NEWS CENTRAL notes, Gupta’s own account of why he’s betting on Kalanick again is unusually candid for a corporate announcement. ‘The single biggest reason I joined was – Travis,’ Gupta wrote Wednesday. ‘I believed he possessed a magical mix of genius and intensity that made me want to bet on the person, not the market.’ Gupta first invested in Uber in 2012 while a vice president at Goldman Sachs and joined the company outright the following year.
Gupta is also stepping down from A*, the venture firm he co-founded in 2020, where Atoms represented what he called the largest single investment in the fund’s history – a vote of confidence NEWSCENTRAL expects Kalanick to lean on heavily as he tries to prove that his second act can outlast the controversies that ended his first.