Kalanick's Robotics Startup Atoms Hires Longtime Meta AI Executive

Travis Kalanick's robotics startup Atoms has hired Vikas Chandra, a longtime Meta AI executive, as its vice president of AI, according to Business Insider. Chandra spent more than eight years at Meta working on AI for the company's smart glasses before announcing the move on X.

"For 8 years my job was making models small enough and fast enough to live on AI glasses," Chandra wrote, according to Business Insider. "The physical world is a harder version of the same problem." At Atoms, he said he plans to build "foundation models for the physical world" aimed at helping machines understand and act in real-world environments.

The hire comes as Kalanick builds out Atoms following a $1.7 billion funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz earlier this summer. Atoms, which has said little publicly about its work, says it is building robots for industries including food, mining, and transportation. Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009 and resigned under investor pressure in 2017 before unveiling Atoms earlier this year, which also absorbed his ghost-kitchen venture, CloudKitchens, as a subsidiary.