Former CFO joins Travis Kalanik’s Atoms startup

Gautam Gupta, Uber’s former CFO, has been appointed chief financial officer of Atoms, a startup founded by Travis Kalanik that focuses on robotics and industrial AI. According to ixbt.com, Gautam Gupta announced the appointment on his social media pages. The move came just weeks after the startup raised a major $1.7 billion investment. TechCrunch.com reports .

Gautam Gupta worked at Uber for more than four years, joining in July 2017—several weeks after Travis Kalanik stepped down as CEO. He had announced his intention to leave as early as May 2017. Gupta had invested in Uber in 2012 while serving as a vice president at Goldman Sachs and joined the company in 2013.

He said that Travis Kalanik was the main reason he joined Uber. Gautam Gupta wrote that the combination of genius and determination he saw in Kalanik led him to bet not on the market, but on the person himself. To take the new position, Gupta is leaving A*, the venture firm he co-founded after working at Opendoor in 2020. A* had made the largest investment in the history of the Atoms startup.

Uber team reunites at Atoms

Gautam Gupta’s appointment continues the trend of Travis Kalanik bringing former colleagues together around Atoms. Earlier this year, Atoms acquired Pronto, a startup focused on mining autonomy. The company is led by Anthony Levandowski, a former self-driving car engineer at Uber and Google. According to LinkedIn, many other senior executives who worked with Kalanik are also now working for Atoms.

The startup, formerly known as CloudKitchens, recently raised $1.7 billion in funding. Interestingly, Uber itself—whose board removed Travis Kalanik in 2017 following various controversies and complaints—also participated in the funding round as an investor. Although Uber has not disclosed how much it invested, The Information and TechCrunch confirmed that the amount was $100 million.

Kalanik’s future plans

When Travis Kalanik announced the funding round last month, he said it was a logical continuation of ideas that began at Uber and CloudKitchens. According to him, Atoms aims to operate in mining, food and transportation. Rather than emphasizing specific project details, Kalanik has focused more on his intention to overcome nature’s resistance to change.

In a social media post, Gautam Gupta wrote that if Travis Kalanik had not founded the ridesharing market, no one else could have endured overcoming such seemingly endless challenges and built a new market worth hundreds of billions of dollars from scratch. Thus, the reunion of the former colleagues at Atoms is expected to lay the groundwork for major changes in industry and robotics.