Travis Kalanick's next act bets on atoms, not bits

After eight years in stealth, Travis Kalanick's Atoms has emerged with $1.7 billion in funding led by a16z, Ben Horowitz joining the board, and Uber reinvesting in its former CEO's new venture. Atoms is organised around three divisions, Food, Mining and Transport, with the explicit ambition of doing to physical-world operations what software did to the digital one. Our view is that the physical distribution layer, warehousing, logistics, last-mile movement, has been disregarded for far too long in the AI conversation, treated as somebody else's infrastructure problem rather than a genuine layer of the agentic stack. That is changing quickly. As agentic systems get better at deciding what should happen, the businesses that also control how it physically gets moved, stored and delivered are the ones positioned to capture the full value of that decision, not just the decision itself. Atoms is a bet that this layer is investable in its own right, and we think that bet is directionally correct. (a16z)