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Travis Kalanick is reportedly starting up a new self-driving vehicle company with \u201cmajor backing\u201d from Uber, according to The Information<\/a>. He has reportedly told people he \u201cwants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo,\u201d per the report.<\/p>\n The Uber founder is also considering acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former colleague at the ride-hailing company, Anthony Levandowski. Last year, Kalanick was said to be interested in buying<\/a> the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI with backing from Uber, though The Information said Friday that those talks ended.<\/p>\n Uber didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. <\/p>\n Kalanick resigned from Uber<\/a> in 2017 after a confluence of crises at the ride-hail company. At the time, the company was plagued by complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, which sparked an external investigation that resulted in more than 20 employees being fired<\/a>.<\/p>\n Before that, Kalanick had created a self-driving division at Uber<\/a> in 2015. Levandowski played a big role in that project after Kalanick lured him away from Google. Uber was ultimately sued by Google for stealing secrets related to its own self-driving car project (which eventually became Waymo). The two companies settled, but Levandowski was criminally charged<\/a> and sentenced to 18 months<\/a> in prison for his role in the affair. The engineer received a last-minute pardon from President Trump at the end of his first term<\/a>.<\/p>\n The company kept working on the project after Kalanick resigned, including after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018<\/a>. Kalanick\u2019s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, shuttered and sold the division<\/a> to autonomous trucking company Aurora in 2020.<\/p>\n In a rare interview in March 2025, Kalanick expressed regret that Uber had abandoned developing its own self-driving cars. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n