Travis Kalanick’s robotics startup Atoms taps former Uber finance chief as CFO
Quick Answer
Travis Kalanick's robotics startup Atoms has appointed former Uber finance chief Gautam Gupta as CFO, following a $1.7 billion funding round.
Quick Take
Gupta, who previously invested in Uber, aims to leverage his experience to drive Atoms' initiatives in mining, food, and transportation.
Key Points
- Gautam Gupta joins Atoms as CFO after a $1.7 billion funding round.
- Gupta previously served as finance chief at Uber under Kalanick.
- Atoms aims to innovate in mining, food, and transportation sectors.
- Uber participated in the funding round, reportedly contributing $100 million.
- Gupta's firm A* made the largest investment in Atoms' history.
DeepSignal Analysis
What happened
Travis Kalanick's robotics startup Atoms has appointed Gautam Gupta, former CFO of Uber, as its new CFO. This appointment follows Atoms' recent $1.7 billion funding round, which included investment from Uber. Gupta aims to utilize his experience to advance Atoms' initiatives in sectors such as mining, food, and transportation.
Key evidence
- Gautam Gupta, who served as Uber's finance chief until July 2017, has joined Atoms as CFO after the company raised $1.7 billion.
- Atoms acquired mining autonomy startup Pronto earlier this year, which is led by former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski.
- Uber participated in Atoms' funding round, reportedly contributing $100 million, re-establishing ties with Kalanick after his departure in 2017.
Why it matters
The appointment of Gupta signals Kalanick's strategy to leverage his former Uber team to drive Atoms' growth. Gupta's experience in finance and his previous investment in Uber may provide valuable insights as Atoms seeks to innovate in various industries. The significant funding round indicates strong investor confidence in Atoms' potential to disrupt traditional markets.
What to watch
📖 Reader Mode
~3 min readAnother former Uber executive is joining Travis Kalanick’s robotics and industrial AI startup Atoms, just a few weeks after it raised $1.7 billion.
Gautam Gupta, the former finance chief under Kalanick, said in social media posts on Wednesday that he has has joined Atoms as chief financial officer. Gupta spent more than four years at Uber until he left in July 2017, just a few weeks after Kalanick resigned as CEO. (Gupta had announced his intention to leave that May.)
Hiring Gupta continues a trend of Kalanick getting the Uber band back together at Atoms. Earlier this year, Atoms acquired mining autonomy startup Pronto, which is run by former Uber (and former Google) self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski. According to LinkedIn, a number of former top Uber employees who worked with Kalanick also work at Atoms, which was previously called CloudKitchens.
“On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business. Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens, and will now finish at Atoms,” Kalanick wrote when he announced the $1.7 billion funding round last month.
Uber even joined the round as an investor, reuniting the company with the founder it pushed out in 2017 after a series of scandals and complaints of widespread sexual harassment and discrimination. Uber hasn’t disclosed how much it contributed. The Information reported $100 million, a figure that TechCrunch has also been able to confirm.
Kalanick has said he wants Atoms to work on mining, food, and transportation, though his posts to date about the startup have been less about specifics and more about wanting to “go up against the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change.”
Gupta invested in Uber in 2012 when he was a vice president at Goldman Sachs, and then joined the company in 2013.
“[T]he single biggest reason I joined was – Travis. I believed he possessed a magical mix of genius and intensity that made me want to bet on the person, not the market,” Gupta wrote Wednesday. “First one in, last one out, every day. Breaking down walls of regulations, unions, city bureaucracies, etc. Had he not pioneered ridesharing, I don’t think anyone else had the fortitude to fight through one adversity after another to create a whole new market worth hundreds of billions out of nothing.”
Gupta wrote Wednesday that A*, the VC firm he co-founded in 2020 after three years at Opendoor, invested in Atoms in what was the “largest investment in the history of our fund.” Gupta is stepping down from A* to take on the CFO role at Atoms, according to his LinkedIn profile.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
Want this in your inbox every morning?
Daily brief at your local 8am — bilingual EN/中文, free.
More from TechCrunch
See more →
AI chip startup Etched defies skeptics, hits $10.3B valuation from big-name investors
AI chip startup Etched has achieved a $10.3 billion valuation after a $300 million Series C funding round, led by Sequoia and supported by notable investors like Andreessen Horowitz. The company claims to have developed innovative low-voltage chips for AI inference, significantly enhancing performance and reducing costs, with $1 billion in orders already booked.
