Atoms raises $1.7B, while Claude helps disprove the Jacobian conjecture
Not Boring (Packy McCormick) · rss · 2026-07-24
Atoms raises $1.7B as Travis Kalanick reunites food, mining, and transport
Packy McCormick’s weekly memo focuses first on Atoms, Travis Kalanick’s rebuilt empire, which announced a $1.7 billion equity investment led by a16z with Ben Horowitz joining the board. Uber is also participating, while Benchmark is not.
The piece frames Atoms as a physical-world conglomerate spanning food, mining, and transport, with Kalanick’s thesis that physical industries can be built like computers: manufacturing as CPU, real estate as storage, and transportation as network. It highlights several operating businesses:
- CloudKitchens / food stack: delivery-first real estate, restaurant OS, food infrastructure, lunch delivery, and robotics.
- Lab37 Bowl Builder: already in restaurants, can assemble up to 300 bowls/hour and reduce assembly labor by 40%+.
- Pronto / mining: autonomous haulage retrofitted onto existing trucks; at a Heidelberg quarry, it moved 2M+ tons of limestone in under eight months and now has a deployment agreement across 100+ trucks.
- Transport: still mostly hidden, described by Kalanick as a wheelbase for robots.
The memo’s second major story says Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge, with help from Claude Fable 5, posted a proof that the Jacobian conjecture is false via a 3-variable polynomial map with constant Jacobian determinant -2 but no inverse.
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