Atoms has been operating in stealth for years, mainly focusing on 'cloud kitchens' for food preparation, as well as more recently automated mining via an acquisition. Atoms is the evolution of Uber in a sense, with a mission of 'digitizing the physical world'

“The idea is an ‘atoms-based computer’:

1. CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms - that’s manufacturing
2. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms - that’s real estate
3. Network moves bits. What moves atoms - that’s transport logistics

Those are your three core computing resources in  an atoms based computer. You can model just about anything with computation.”

“The idea of treating atoms like bits started at uber. It was science fiction at one point: you would touch glass (your phone) and a car would come to you, and you had satellite view and you’re watching this car come to you, it was crazy. Now it’s just like whatever, but it was crazy at the time, everyone’s first Uber experience was a magical moment.”

"The meaningful thing about Atoms Food: can you make the preparation and delivery of a meal so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to a grocery store? If it does, you do to the kitchen what uber did to the car. That’s a big deal, but what do you need to do to get there? 3 things:

• Warehouses like Amazon style Picking, packing, sorting, and then putting in a car (we already have many hundreds of facilities in 30 countries)
• Robotics automated food/meal production (we’re getting a manufacturing line for our robots up this year, and essentially everyone in robotics would agree eventually robots will make better food than most people, and now you’re taking over $5 out in labor)
• Robotic couriers that hold food at temperature and come to your house (once we get the robotic couriers you go from over $10 a drop for each meal to under a dollar)

And you save a few bucks on occupancy per meal. And all of a sudden you are getting a high quality meal delivered to you all in for under $10 bucks. Based on robotic process and seeing Waymo’s already navigating autonomously, we will easily be here in 20 years. Can we do it faster? What about in 10, or in 7, or in 5? That’s when you’re bending reality, you’re bending it towards now. Everybody would agree that it’s going to happen, and now it’s about when and who. And then you say LFG."

Travis on the expanding into autonomous mining:

"More productive mines to power Earth’s industries. We’re operating in a bunch of mines around the world. When you automate certain parts of mining you not only get more gold or silver or whatever you’re mining, you dramatically improve safety in a real way. And new mines are going to emerge that were not viable before. 

Once you get the foothold and it’s working, you can keep expanding. Adjacent categories are way easier than whole new off the rails categories. First it’s uber rides then it’s uber eats then it’s uber autonomy then it’s uber freight then it’s uber AI labs. When it comes to expansion, you can start letting your imagination, with constraints, start to do really interesting things."