Travis Kalanick’s Robotics Venture Atoms Appoints Former Uber Finance Chief as CFO

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

Gautam Gupta, who served as finance chief under Kalanick, announced on social media Wednesday that he has taken on the role of chief financial officer at Atoms. Gupta was with Uber for over four years until his departure in July 2017, shortly after Kalanick stepped down as CEO. (Gupta had revealed his plans to leave that May.)

The hiring of Gupta aligns with Kalanick’s trend of reassembling the Uber team at Atoms. Earlier this year, Atoms acquired the mining autonomy startup Pronto, led by former Uber (and Google) self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski. According to LinkedIn, several former key Uber employees who worked with Kalanick are also part of Atoms, which was previously named 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 noted when announcing last month’s $1.7 billion funding round.

Uber took part 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. While Uber has not disclosed its contribution, sources indicate it was around $100 million, a figure TechCrunch has confirmed.

Kalanick has articulated his goal for Atoms to explore mining, food, and transportation sectors, although his remarks have focused more on aspiration rather than specifics, stating a desire to “challenge the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change.”

Gupta initially invested in Uber in 2012 while he was a vice president at Goldman Sachs and then joined the firm in 2013.

“The primary reason I joined was – Travis. I believed he had a unique blend of genius and intensity that encouraged me to invest in the person, not just the market,” Gupta mentioned 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 face adversity repeatedly and create a new market worth hundreds of billions from scratch.”

On Wednesday, Gupta shared that A*, the VC firm he co-founded in 2020 after three years at Opendoor, invested in Atoms, marking the “largest investment in the history of our fund.” He is stepping down from A* to assume the CFO position at Atoms, according to his LinkedIn profile.