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Uber founder Travis Kalanick has a new company called Atoms<\/a> focused on robotics that, according to its website, will operate in the food, mining, and transportation industries.<\/p>\n Kalanick is rolling his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It\u2019s not immediately clear how he plans to tackle mining and transportation. Atoms\u2019 website says it will build a \u201cwheelbase for robots,\u201d and Kalanick said in a live interview with TBPN<\/a> on Friday that his company will apply this wheelbase to \u201cspecialized robots\u201d \u2014 not humanoids.<\/p>\n \u201cHumanoids have their place, but there\u2019s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n To support the mining business, Kalanick said Friday that he\u2019s on the precipice of acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick revealed Friday that he is already the \u201clargest investor\u201d in Pronto. <\/p>\n \u201cThe industrial thing is sort of like, probably, our main jam,\u201d Kalanick told TBPN. Kalanick demurred on the idea of using Atoms robots to move people, at least in the near-term. \u201cOnce you crack movement in the physical world, there\u2019s lots of people who want access to that.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier Friday The Information<\/a> reported Kalanick was getting back into self-driving vehicles with \u201cmajor backing\u201d from Uber, and that he has reportedly told people he \u201cwants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo.\u201d Uber didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. Atoms\u2019 website makes no mention of Uber. The Information first reported Kalanick was discussing acquiring Pronto.<\/p>\n 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 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