Gautam Gupta, the former chief financial officer of Uber, has joined Travis Kalanick’s robotics and industrial AI startup Atoms as its new CFO, the executive announced on social media on Wednesday, August 5, 2026.
The hire comes just weeks after Atoms closed a $1.7 billion funding round. Gupta previously served as Uber’s finance chief for more than four years before departing in July 2017 — shortly after Kalanick resigned as CEO following a series of scandals and complaints of widespread sexual harassment and discrimination. Gupta had announced his intention to leave that May.
To take the CFO role, Gupta is stepping down from A*, the venture capital firm he co-founded in 2020 after three years at Opendoor. He noted that A* made its “largest investment in the history of our fund” into Atoms as part of the recent round.
The appointment continues a pattern of Kalanick recruiting former Uber colleagues to Atoms, which was previously known as CloudKitchens. Earlier in 2026, Atoms acquired Pronto, a mining autonomy startup run by Anthony Levandowski, a former Uber and Google self-driving engineer. Uber itself also participated in the $1.7 billion funding round, contributing approximately $100 million according to reporting confirmed by TechCrunch.
Kalanick has stated he wants Atoms to operate across mining, food, and transportation sectors. “On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business. Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens, and will now finish at Atoms,” he wrote when announcing the funding.
Gupta, who first invested in Uber in 2012 while at Goldman Sachs before joining the company in 2013, cited his relationship with Kalanick as the primary motivation for returning. “The single biggest reason I joined was – Travis,” he wrote Wednesday.
Source: TechCrunch