Travis Kalanick isn’t done.
The combative, relentless co-founder of Uber — who was pushed out of the ride-hailing giant he built in 2017 amid a cascade of scandals — is plotting his return to the technology industry’s center stage. This time, the arena isn’t transportation logistics or food delivery. It’s artificial intelligence and robotics, two fields converging at a moment when billions of dollars in venture capital are chasing anything that moves, thinks, or learns on its own.
According to The Information, Kalanick has been laying the groundwork for new startup ventures focused on AI and robotics. The report, based on people familiar with his plans, indicates that the former CEO has been meeting with engineers, researchers, and potential investors as he shapes what could become his most ambitious undertaking since Uber’s founding in 2009.
The details remain thin. That’s by design.
Kalanick has historically operated with a preference for stealth over spectacle in the earliest stages of company building — the spectacle, as Uber’s history demonstrated, tends to come later. What is known is that his interest sits at the intersection of AI software and physical robotics, a domain that has attracted enormous attention from venture capitalists, corporate R&D labs, and governments worldwide over the past two years. The explosion of generative AI, catalyzed by OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, has reshaped investment priorities across Silicon Valley and beyond, sending capital flooding into companies that promise to bring machine intelligence into the physical world.
For Kalanick, this isn’t an entirely new fixation. During his tenure at Uber, he bet heavily on autonomous vehicles, acquiring the self-driving truck startup Otto in 2016 and pouring resources into Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group. That effort was plagued by controversy — including a trade-secrets lawsuit from Waymo that resulted in a settlement — and ultimately Uber sold its autonomous vehicle unit to the startup Aurora Innovation in 2020. But the strategic instinct behind those moves, that software-driven automation of physical tasks would define the next era of technology, has only been validated by subsequent developments.
Since leaving Uber, Kalanick has kept a relatively low profile compared to his peers in the founder-celebrity class. He launched CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen company that leases commercial kitchen space to restaurants for delivery-only operations. The venture, funded in part by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, has been polarizing. Some view it as a shrewd bet on the structural shift toward food delivery accelerated by the pandemic. Others see it as a real estate arbitrage play that lacks the transformative ambition of Uber. CloudKitchens has expanded internationally but has also faced operational challenges and scrutiny over its workplace culture — echoes, critics say, of Uber under Kalanick’s leadership.
Now, the AI and robotics push suggests Kalanick wants something bigger.
The timing is telling. The robotics industry is experiencing a surge of interest not seen since the early days of industrial automation. Companies like Figure AI, which is developing humanoid robots and recently raised capital at a valuation exceeding $2.6 billion, have captured the imagination of investors including Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Tesla continues to develop its Optimus humanoid robot, with Elon Musk repeatedly claiming it could eventually become more valuable than the company’s automobile business. Chinese firms like Unitree Robotics are pushing aggressively into the space with lower-cost hardware. And a wave of startups — from Covariant to Physical Intelligence to Skild AI — are building the AI “brains” they hope will allow robots to perform complex tasks in unstructured environments like warehouses, homes, and construction sites.
The money tells the story. Venture capital investment in robotics and AI-for-robotics startups has accelerated sharply. According to data tracked by PitchBook, funding for robotics companies in the United States surged in 2024, with several deals exceeding $100 million. The thesis driving these investments is straightforward: large language models and foundation models, the same technology underpinning ChatGPT and its competitors, can be adapted to control physical machines. If that thesis proves correct, the economic implications are staggering — robots that can learn new tasks from demonstration or instruction rather than being explicitly programmed for each one.
Kalanick, whatever his detractors say about his management style, has a track record of identifying massive markets before they mature. Uber was founded when the idea of summoning a car with a smartphone app seemed like a novelty for San Francisco tech workers. It became a verb. The question now is whether Kalanick can replicate that kind of market creation in a field that is technically far more demanding and where competition is already fierce.
There are reasons for skepticism. Autonomous vehicles — the closest analogue to what Kalanick appears to be pursuing — have proven far harder to commercialize than early advocates predicted. Waymo, backed by Alphabet’s deep pockets, has spent over a decade and billions of dollars and still operates its robotaxi service in a limited number of cities. Cruise, General Motors’ autonomous vehicle unit, suffered a major setback in 2023 after an incident involving a pedestrian in San Francisco and has been working to rebuild trust with regulators. The gap between impressive demos and reliable, scalable products in robotics remains enormous.
And then there’s the Kalanick factor itself.
His departure from Uber was not voluntary. A board-level revolt, triggered by revelations about a toxic workplace culture, allegations of sexual harassment within the company, and Kalanick’s own aggressive behavior — including a caught-on-camera argument with an Uber driver — forced him out. The subsequent years saw Uber, under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, attempt to shed the “win at all costs” ethos that Kalanick had instilled. Investors and potential partners in any new Kalanick venture will inevitably weigh whether the founder has evolved or whether the same traits that made Uber both wildly successful and deeply problematic will resurface.
But Silicon Valley has a short memory for scandal when the returns are large enough. And Kalanick, for all the baggage, retains a network of loyalists, engineers who worked with him at Uber, investors who made fortunes on its IPO, and operators who admire his intensity. His ability to recruit top-tier talent — always the scarcest resource in technology — will be the first real test of whether his new ventures can gain traction.
The specific structure of Kalanick’s planned AI and robotics efforts isn’t yet clear. The Information reported that he is considering launching multiple startups rather than a single company, potentially allowing him to place several bets across different applications of AI and robotics simultaneously. This approach would mirror a venture studio model, where a central team incubates and spins out companies, retaining equity stakes across a portfolio. It’s a structure that has gained popularity among serial entrepreneurs who want diversification without the constraints of a single corporate entity.
If Kalanick does pursue robotics applications tied to logistics, food service, or last-mile delivery, he’d be building on domain expertise accumulated through both Uber and CloudKitchens. Ghost kitchens, by their nature, involve repetitive physical tasks — food preparation, packaging, order staging — that are prime candidates for automation. A robotics play that starts in controlled kitchen environments and expands outward would be a logical extension of CloudKitchens’ existing operations, giving Kalanick something many robotics startups lack: a captive customer for early-stage products.
The broader context matters too. The AI industry is in a peculiar moment. Enormous capital is being deployed, but the path to profitability for many AI companies remains unclear. OpenAI, despite its cultural dominance, is burning cash at a prodigious rate. Anthropic, its closest competitor, is similarly dependent on continued fundraising. The companies building AI hardware — Nvidia chief among them — are printing money, but the downstream application layer is still sorting itself out. Robotics, as a physical application of AI, offers something that chatbots and image generators don’t: a clear, measurable productivity gain in industries like manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, and food service where labor costs are high and rising.
That economic argument is what makes the space so attractive to investors right now. It’s also what makes it attractive to someone like Kalanick, who has always been drawn to markets where technology can displace incumbent cost structures.
Whether Kalanick can build something enduring this time — something that outlasts the hype cycle and survives the inevitable technical and organizational challenges — is the open question. He’s 48 years old, wealthy beyond any practical need, and under no obligation to re-enter the arena. The fact that he’s choosing to do so, in a field this technically demanding and capital-intensive, suggests either supreme confidence or an inability to sit still. Probably both.
The technology industry loves a comeback story almost as much as it loves a fall-from-grace narrative. Travis Kalanick has already provided one of the latter. Now he’s angling for the former. The robots, if they arrive, will be the least interesting part of the story.
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