Travis Kalanick has rebranded his holding company City Storage Systems as Atoms, a robotics venture targeting the food, mining and transport industries, and is absorbing CloudKitchens, the ghost kitchen operator that has been the most visible piece of his post-Uber empire, into the new entity.
The announcement on March 13 ends eight years of stealth during which thousands of Atoms employees were reportedly not permitted to publicly name their employer. Kalanick revealed that CloudKitchens, which operates in 30 countries and reached a reported $15 billion valuation by 2022, was effectively research and development for a broader robotics platform. Atoms will build what Kalanick described as "gainfully employed robots," specialised industrial machines rather than humanoids, applied first to food assembly, then to mining and autonomous transport.
To extend the platform into mining, Kalanick said he is close to acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup founded by Anthony Levandowski, the former Google and Uber engineer who was criminally charged over trade secret theft and later pardoned by President Trump. Kalanick confirmed he is already Pronto's largest investor.
The rebrand carries significant implications for the Middle East, where CloudKitchens has built a substantial presence and where plans for a public listing were actively pursued before being shelved late last year.
CloudKitchens' regional arm operates under the KitchenPark brand across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, with the business incorporated in Abu Dhabi. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund invested $400 million in CloudKitchens in 2019, building on a relationship that began with PIF's $3.5 billion stake in Uber three years earlier.
FWDstart reported in September 2025 that CloudKitchens had added JPMorgan, SNB Capital and First Abu Dhabi Bank to its adviser roster alongside Goldman Sachs, with a dual listing in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi under consideration at a targeted $2 billion valuation and timing potentially as early as 2026. By December, Bloomberg reported that the company had shelved those plans and was instead considering a private placement, as part of a broader slowdown in regional public listings.
The pivot to Atoms adds a new layer of uncertainty to those plans. Bloomberg noted that CloudKitchens' delayed IPO was referenced on the Atoms website, and that listing plans could still be revived. But folding a regional ghost kitchen operator into a Los Angeles-based robotics holding company with ambitions spanning food automation, mining and autonomous transport fundamentally changes the investment proposition that Gulf-based advisers and potential investors were evaluating just months ago.
The question for the region is whether KitchenPark's Gulf operations retain enough standalone identity and financial profile to support a future listing, or whether the Atoms rebrand effectively subsumes the Middle Eastern business into a structure that is harder to carve out for public markets. A dual listing was always going to be unusual for a company of CloudKitchens' profile; it becomes considerably more complex when the parent entity is now positioning itself as an industrial robotics platform.
The broader market environment offers little encouragement either. The Tadawul has faced sustained pressure through early 2026, while Talabat's stock on the DFM has fallen more than 56% from its December 2024 IPO price, providing a cautionary reference point for any technology company considering a Gulf debut.
The Iranian strikes on the UAE in early March, which triggered a two-day suspension of trading on the DFM and ADX and a 4.7% single-session drop when markets reopened, have compounded concerns about regional financial stability.
The conflict overhang is likely to weigh on the IPO pipeline more broadly, with expected listings from the likes of Tabby and other high-profile regional technology companies facing an investor environment that is materially more cautious than it was six months ago.
Kalanick's personal ties to the Gulf have deepened in parallel. In October 2025, he was granted Saudi citizenship under a Vision 2030 programme targeting exceptional global talent, and he has spearheaded what the company described as a $1.25 billion investment push to accelerate regional expansion. Whether that expansion continues under the Atoms banner, and in what form, remains to be seen.
Atoms' food division includes Lab37, a Pittsburgh-based robotics lab developing a food assembly machine called Bowl Builder, the Otter POS system, and the Picnic office catering service, alongside CloudKitchens' existing ghost kitchen infrastructure. The company's manifesto, posted on its website, struck a personal tone, with Kalanick writing: "I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena."
