Atoms, Travis Kalanick's industrial AI and robotics company, named Gautam Gupta chief financial officer on August 5, TechCrunch reported. Gupta joined Uber in 2013 and became its highest-ranking finance executive after CFO Brent Callinicos left in 2015. He departed in July 2017, the same year Kalanick was pushed out as CEO of the company he co-founded.
Who Gupta is
Gupta was a vice president at Goldman Sachs when the bank invested in Uber in 2012, and joined the company the following year. After leaving in 2017 he spent three years at Opendoor, then co-founded the venture firm A* in 2020. He is stepping down from A* to take the Atoms job. A* is itself an Atoms investor, and described its stake as the largest investment in the firm's history.
What Atoms is
Atoms is the renamed CloudKitchens, the ghost-kitchen business whose parent, City Storage Systems, Kalanick took control of in 2018 after leaving Uber. It now positions itself as an industrial AI business aimed at mining, food and transportation, applying software, sensors and robotics to physical work.
The company announced a $1.7 billion raise in late July, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the board. The Robot Report listed the equity participants as Bain Capital, Uber, Fifth Wall, Chemistry, A*, K5 Global, Abstract, SV Angel and Alpha Square Group, alongside debt partners Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan and Barclays. TechCrunch reported Uber's own contribution at $100 million.
Atoms has also been acquiring. It bought Pronto, the mining-autonomy startup run by Anthony Levandowski, the former Google and Uber engineer.
Other industrial robotics companies raised large rounds in the same stretch. Toyota-backed Walden Robotics raised a $300 million seed at a $1.1 billion valuation in July, and Agility Robotics agreed to go public through a $2.5 billion SPAC deal with Churchill Capital. Uber-backed Lime raised $174 million in a Nasdaq IPO in July.
Source: TechCrunch
Comments