Travis Kalanick's Robotics Startup Taps Meta Veteran for Top AI Role

Travis Kalanick's new robotics startup, Atoms, has scooped up a high-profile hire.

Vikas Chandra, a longtime Meta AI executive who led AI work for the company's smart glasses, announced Monday that he is joining the startup as vice president of AI.

At Atoms, Chandra said he will build "foundation models for the physical world" — AI systems designed to help machines understand and act in real-world environments.

"For 8 years my job was making models small enough and fast enough to live on AI glasses," Chandra wrote on X. "The physical world is a harder version of the same problem."

Atoms and Chandra did not respond to requests for comment.

Atoms, which has revealed few details about its work, says it is building robots for industries including food, mining, and transportation. Kalanick, who co-founded Uber in 2009 but resigned under investor pressure in 2017, publicly unveiled Atoms earlier this year after years of operating in stealth. Atoms absorbed Kalanick's ghost-kitchen venture, CloudKitchens, as a subsidiary.

The company raised $1.7 billion earlier this summer in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz to pursue what Kalanick called "a journey to digitize the physical world."

"On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business," Kalanick wrote on X during the announcement. "Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens, and will now finish at Atoms."

Chandra's arrival is the latest in a string of prominent hires at Atoms.

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Last month, former Uber finance chief Gautam Gupta joined the startup as chief financial officer. Earlier this year, Atoms acquired autonomous-mining startup Pronto, which is run by former Uber self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski. Several former Uber employees also work at Atoms, according to LinkedIn.

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