Travis Kalanick’s Robotics Startup Atoms Hires Former Uber CFO as Finance Chief

A former Uber executive is joining Travis Kalanick’s robotics and industrial AI venture, Atoms, just weeks after it raised $1.7 billion in funding.

Gautam Gupta, who previously held the position of finance chief under Kalanick, announced on social media Wednesday that he has accepted the role of chief financial officer at Atoms. Gupta was with Uber for over four years, leaving in July 2017 shortly after Kalanick resigned as CEO, although he had disclosed plans to depart that May.

Gupta’s hiring reflects Kalanick’s strategy of regrouping the Uber team at Atoms. Earlier this year, Atoms acquired the mining autonomy startup Pronto, headed by ex-Uber (and Google) self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski. According to LinkedIn, several former Uber employees who collaborated with Kalanick are now part of Atoms, which was formerly known as CloudKitchens.

“On many levels, this funding round represents some unfinished business. It’s fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms journey we initiated at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens, and will now conclude at Atoms,” Kalanick remarked when announcing the $1.7 billion funding round last month.

Uber participated in the funding round as an investor, reconnecting with the founder it ousted in 2017 amid various scandals and allegations of widespread sexual harassment and discrimination. Although Uber has not specified its investment, sources suggest it was approximately $100 million, a figure confirmed by TechCrunch.

Kalanick has expressed his ambition for Atoms to delve into mining, food, and transportation industries, although his comments have leaned more towards aspiration than specifics, stating a goal to “challenge the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change.”

Gupta initially invested in Uber in 2012 while serving as a vice president at Goldman Sachs and later joined the company in 2013.

“The primary reason I joined was – Travis. I believed he had a unique mix of genius and intensity that inspired me to invest in the person, not just the market,” Gupta noted in his Wednesday post. “Always the first in and the last out, breaking down barriers of regulations, unions, and city bureaucracies. Had he not been a pioneer in ridesharing, I’m not sure anyone else would have had the resilience to continuously face adversity and create a new market worth hundreds of billions from scratch.”

On Wednesday, Gupta announced that A*, the VC firm he co-founded in 2020 following three years at Opendoor, invested in Atoms, marking the “largest investment in the history of our fund.” He is stepping down from A* to take on the CFO role at Atoms, as indicated in his LinkedIn profile.