Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Travis Kalanick's Atoms Raises $1.7 Billion to Build 'Gainfully Employed' Robots for Heavy Industry

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Travis Kalanick's Atoms Raises $1.7 Billion to Build 'Gainfully Employed' Robots for Heavy Industry · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the man who swore your Uber driver wasn't an employee now builds robots he calls gainfully employed. TechCrunch reported Tuesday that Travis Kalanick's new company, Atoms, raised one-point-seven billion dollars, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
• 0:16
  [Guest] And Uber put money in too. So Kalanick just cashed a check from the company that pushed him out as CEO back in 2017. Ben Horowitz takes a board seat.
• 0:28
  [Host] Atoms. What does it actually do? The name tells me nothing.
• 0:32
  [Guest] It's a rebrand. His old holding company, CloudKitchens, became Atoms, then bought an industrial-automation firm called Pronto to put AI-driven robots into factories and mines.
• 0:42
  [Host] Mines. So not a humanoid folding laundry, this is heavy industry.
• 0:47
  [Guest] Heavy industry, and it's part of a wave. Reuters reported the same week that a UK startup literally called Humanoid hit a one-point-three-five billion dollar valuation, with the German parts giant Schaeffler signing on to deploy a thousand of the robots in its own plants.
• 1:04
  [Host] What's the actual pitch? A billion-plus dollars needs a story.
• 1:08
  [Guest] The company line, and I'm quoting, is gainfully employed robots that bring abundance to their owners and society at large. Read the order again. Owners first, society second.
• 1:19
  [Host] The robots get the jobs, and the workers get, what, gratitude?
• 1:24
  [Guest] That's the tension. Kalanick calls it finishing a bits-to-atoms story he started at Uber, digitizing the physical world. At Uber, the humans were contractors with no benefits. Now the labor line is a machine he describes as employed.
• 1:38
  [Host] But is the money even there? Robots in a mine sounds expensive, not cheap.
• 1:44
  [Guest] Long run, brutally cheap. Tesla's own target cost for its Optimus humanoid is twenty thousand dollars a unit. Run that over two shifts a day and the labor pencils out near forty cents an hour.
• 1:58
  [Host] And a US manufacturing worker?
• 2:00
  [Guest] About thirty dollars an hour. Forty cents against thirty dollars. There's no wage anywhere, not Germany, not Bangladesh, that competes with that.
• 2:08
  [Host] So when the machine costs pennies, where does the money go?
• 2:13
  [Guest] To whoever owns the machine. Which is exactly what Atoms printed on the label. The value doesn't vanish, it just changes hands, from the worker to the owner.
• 2:24
  [Host] Is this real, though, or a pitch deck? Who's hiring robots to mine?
• 2:29
  [Guest] Pronto ran real autonomous-haulage sites before the deal, and that Schaeffler order is a signed contract, not vaporware. The buyers are mines and factories that can't staff dangerous shifts.
• 2:40
  [Host] Which is the honest upside. Nobody wants a person underground if a machine can go instead.
• 2:46
  [Guest] True. But fewer dangerous shifts also means fewer paychecks in towns that only ever had those shifts. Both things are true at the same time.
• 2:56
  [Host] So if the wealth pools with the owners, what's the actual fix?
• 3:01
  [Guest] You can't just recite abundance as a slogan the way Atoms did. It has to be built as real infrastructure everyone can stand on, not charity handed down by whoever owns the robots.
• 3:14
  [Host] Patrick Deglon calls that floor the Foundation in his book Unscarcity, housing, healthcare, and energy provided to you simply because you exist.
• 3:22
  [Guest] For more on who captures the value when work gets automated, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.