Atoms

Atoms strengthens its AI leadership with the arrival of Vikas Chandra, who spent over eight years at Meta on AI for glasses. 7 billion fundraising and adds to recent recruitments and acquisitions. The company states it aims to develop models for the physical world and robots for food, mining, and transportation. 7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Travis Kalanick presented this funding as 'unfinished business' and fuel to complete an arc 'from bits to atoms'. Last month, Gautam Gupta, former Uber CFO, joined Atoms as CFO, and earlier this year, the company acquired Pronto, an autonomous mining startup led by Anthony Levandowski, former Uber autonomous driving engineer.

Atoms also absorbed CloudKitchens as a subsidiary. Vikas Chandra's arrival is part of this series of recruitments, and several Uber alumni are among the staff, according to LinkedIn. Travis Kalanick states he is pursuing a 'journey to digitize the physical world'. Travis Kalanick announced that Vikas Chandra will now hold the position of Vice President of AI. Chandra, who worked at Meta for over eight years, notably oversaw research on AI applied to smart glasses there. He specifies wanting to create foundational models adapted to the physical world and recalls on X having spent eight years developing models compact and fast enough to be used in AI glasses, while considering the physical world to be a more complex version of the same challenge.