Like other California billionaires, Travis Kalanick was proud to announce his departure from the state. The Uber founder turned AI mogul moved to Austin, Texas, last December. 

But when it came time to launch his “physical AI” startup last week, tech’s bad boy was back in the Bay Area. 

In a series of posts on X, Kalanick announced that his new food, transportation, and mining AI company, Atoms, will be “inclusive and safe” and will “uplift the downtrodden and oppressed builders among us.” The “global launch party” for Atoms was an invitation-only affair Thursday evening at an unnamed location in San Francisco.

The event marked a return by the brash billionaire to a city he upended with private cars on demand and a font of boardroom drama. Kalanick was forced to resign from Uber in 2017 amid sexual harassment allegations and leadership scandals. He spent the next eight years waterskiing in Austin, gaining citizenship in Saudi Arabia (opens in new tab), and building his food delivery startup, CloudKitchens, in L.A. and New York City. 

Now, CloudKitchens is becoming part of Atoms, which he says will use AI to automate food preparation, delivery logistics, and the extraction of critical minerals — the next step toward his “life’s work” of “digitizing the physical world.”

“There were a lot of folks who couldn’t get in,” Kalanick told guests while presenting a slide deck at the soiree. Then, as seen in an X post, (opens in new tab) he projected a screenshot referring to his nemesis, Bill Gurley, the investor who threw him out of Uber in 2017. “Even some of my biggest fans weren’t invited,” Kalanick told the crowd with an impish smile. Laughter ensued. 

Unlike Uber, which was founded in San Francisco and is still based in the city, Atoms is based in Los Angeles. It’s unclear how much of its workforce will be in the Bay, where CloudKitchens has a small office and Pronto, the AI mining startup that Kalanick recently acquired, is located. 

Kalanick is not the only elder statesman of the tech industry staging a comeback against the backdrop of San Francisco’s AI boom. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently snapped up 30,000 square feet of office space in the Financial District for his AI manufacturing startup Project Prometheus and is on the hunt for more industrial space locally. 

A trail of lawsuits, bad press, and an interview with a former employee suggests that while Kalanick’s venue and line of business may have changed with CloudKitchens, his approach to founder mode has not. In its capacity for creating disgruntled employees and contractors, the startup is reminiscent of Uber, the former employee said.

Neither Kalanick nor a rep for Atoms responded to requests for comment.

The AI industry, with its feuds and coups, generates no shortage of drama, and with the launch of Atoms, another big personality is joining the mix.

With a one-time 5% wealth tax for billionaires looming on California’s November ballot, several of the state’s high-profile moguls decamped for other locales before the Jan. 1 relocation deadline — Kalanick among them. 

In a March interview (opens in new tab) on the “TBPN” podcast, Kalanick said he moved to Texas Dec. 18. But he seems to recognize that he can’t ignore what’s happening in San Francisco. The podcast hosts asked whether he planned to “push back into SF” and “go back to being king.”

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“The action for a lot of this Atoms type technology that I’m talking about, of course — the Bay is a real thing,” Kalanick replied. 

Indeed, the Bay Area has seen a robotics boom, with Bezos’ Prometheus deal and OpenAI’s lease of a building in Richmond as a robotics lab. It’s also a hotbed for recruiting in the so-called physical AI industry and home to Scale AI, Agility Robotics, and Google. 

Pronto, the AI mining company Kalanick acquired, is registered to an address in SoMa. 

At Thursday’s party, Kalanick’s pals seemed happy to have him in town, tweeting selfies with captions like “He’s back!!!” and “The goat.” 

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“Our guy — great guy — Travis launching another generational company called Atoms!!” tweeted venture capitalist and poker player Phil Hellmuth, who rode (opens in new tab) to the event with fellow venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya. 

Atoms is the culmination of several deals and investments over the past few years. Through his personal investment fund, Kalanick in 2018 purchased an L.A.-based real estate startup for $150 million that would become the anchor for a portfolio of food delivery businesses. These came to include CloudKitchens, which offers delivery from restaurants that have no storefronts; Otter, which makes the software for ordering; Picnic, which provides lunch to office workers; and Pittsburgh-based Lab37, which sells robotic food assembly systems. 

The approach has drawn big money from investors. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund put $400 million into CloudKitchens in 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported (opens in new tab), followed by an investment from Microsoft and others in an $850 million round that valued the company at $15 billion in 2022. 

It’s not obvious how robots that make take-out provide synergies to Pronto’s industrial mining robotic vehicles. According to the Atoms website, food, transportation, and mining are the company’s three “computers,” with the throughline being “specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large.” As with Uber, it seems to be about moving stuff around as seamlessly as possible, whether it be people, burritos, or rare-earth minerals. 

Kalanick described the mining play as follows in the “TBPN” interview: “It’s super inspiring work. Like, go to a mine. Check out how these things work, and let your mind imagine what that might look like when you bring automation to it.” 

Kalanick has been secretive about the development of the business, even prohibiting staffers from naming their employer on LinkedIn. In a post on X, Atoms’ CTO said this practice makes recruiting difficult. 

Pronto, it’s worth noting, was founded by Anthony Levandowski, who gained notoriety in January 2016 when he quit Google’s Waymo to start his own self-driving company, Otto. Mere months later, he sold Otto to Uber and began building out Uber’s self-driving project. Google soon claimed that he had stolen trade secrets and taken them to Uber. Lawsuits and criminal prosecutions followed, and Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison (opens in new tab) in 2020 for theft of trade secrets. President Donald Trump pardoned him in 2021.

When Kalanick announced the Pronto acquisition and the creation of Atoms in March, he said the company had been in “stealth mode” for eight years — a comment that prompted smirks from the tech cognoscenti.  “8 years?” Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham said (opens in new tab) on X. “Is that a record?” 

Kalanick left San Francisco behind when he resigned from Uber in 2017. But lawsuits and an interview with a former employee suggest the toxic workplace he famously fostered in the gung-ho era of the gig economy have followed him to CloudKitchens. 

Kalanick’s downfall at Uber began when a software engineer alleged that the company’s culture was rife with gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment. When her blog post went viral, a litany of lawsuits brought by employees and customers followed. At the time, Uber was also under fire for its cutthroat business practices, which included allegedly evading law enforcement (opens in new tab), stalking journalists (opens in new tab), and exploiting drivers. After a video of Kalanick arguing with a driver was made public, he was forced to resign. 

Emil Michael, one of Kalanick’s top executives at Uber, who is now a top official in Trump’s Department of Defense, said in a podcast interview (opens in new tab) in March that he would “never forgive” the people who pushed out Kalanick and his core team. Kalanick, who had lost his parents in a boating accident the same year, said the episode left him “heartbroken.” 

A former CloudKitchens employee who spoke to The Standard on condition of anonymity described the culture there as a boys’ club with an aggressive sales culture. “Everything at Uber was brought to Atoms,” the person said, including some of the staff. 

Female employees have filed lawsuits alleging discrimination and harassment at CloudKitchens. One former employee alleged systemic gender-based discrimination, claiming that male employees were paid more than women, Business Insider (opens in new tab) reported in 2022. In another suit, a former account executive claimed that her firing shortly after returning from maternity leave was discriminatory, Techcrunch (opens in new tab) reported in 2024.

The former employee told The Standard that the culture at CloudKitchens relied on high-pressure sales tactics and quotas. Salespeople are hired on a three-month probationary period and fired if they don’t hit “notoriously unattainable” quotas, the former employee said. As a result, they will say “whatever it takes to close the sale.” The former employee said he frequently heard calls from customers complaining that CloudKitchens “overpromised and under-delivered.” 

A string of lawsuits echo those complaints. One case, filed in 2024 and moved to mediation earlier this month, describes a poke restaurant that signed up with CloudKitchens, only to be plagued by termites falling from the ceiling and ants crawling all over the food. When June Choe, the 52-year-old proprietor, called CloudKitchens for help, it hired a pest control company that hung a tarp under the ceiling but did little else, according to a complaint filed in Orange County. When Choe decided to “withhold rent payment due to the untenable conditions,” CloudKitchens responded by initiating “two abrupt and unexplained shutdowns of her business” on separate days in October 2023.

Choe declined to comment. 

Just how Kalanick’s expansion into AI, mining, and robotics will impact CloudKitchen’s  restaurant operators is not clear. Atoms is apparently innovating in recruiting: The company’s CTO recently started screening software engineers with IQ tests, according to Business Insider (opens in new tab) and the former employee.