US-based Pronto has confirmed its acquisition by lead investor and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and his renamed company, Atoms. A Pronto announcement followed Kalanick’s earlier signalling that Atoms was moving into the mine autonomy business.
Atoms, previously known as City Storage Systems, said last month on its website it was focusing on the ‘food infrastructure”, mining and transport markets with its “physical world computation portfolio”.
A March CNBC report quoted Kalanick saying he was the largest investor in Pronto, the Silicon Valley-based quarry and mine vehicle automation company started by former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski, in 2018. The report said Kalanick was in the process of adding Pronto to his Atoms stable.
Kalanick founded Uber in 2009 and left the company in 2017. He indicated last month Atoms had been operating in stealth mode for eight years with “thousands of employees” and said in a lengthy mission statement on the Atoms website the company’s goal was to deliver “physical automation to transform industry and move the world”.
“Software has automated tasks of language and math but the complete automation of the physical world – autonomy – remains largely untouched territory [and] the principal unlock to the next era of progress and abundance,” Kalanick wrote.
“History refers to this kind of moment of radical progress as a golden age. Everything in our world, in our cities, in our civilisation … is mined or grown. The next golden age will be upon us when the means of growing, mining, manufacturing and moving physical things becomes fully divorced from human labour.
“Though we’re less than one millionth of the way there, the inevitable destination is the singularity – superhuman intelligence and efficiency. Until then, abundance will be creating more jobs, not less.”
Pronto’s Levandowski claimed this week the firm had “pioneered a vision-first, OEM-agnostic approach to AHS [autonomous haulage systems] that delivers faster deployment measured in weeks, not months, lower total cost of ownership and easier retrofitting of existing fleets”.
“We have proven this technology at industrial scale,” he said.
“Under our global agreement with Heidelberg Materials we are deploying our AHS across more than 100 trucks over a dozen global operations. At Heidelberg’s Lake Bridgeport, Texas quarry, our AHS successfully hauled over two million tonnes in a mixed-fleet environment in under eight months.”
Major Japanese mining equipment manufacturer Komatsu confirmed last August it had formed a “strategic partnership” with Pronto to deploy autonomous haulage systems in quarries in North America.
“The collaboration centres on Komatsu Smart Quarry Autonomous, powered by Pronto. This system integrates Pronto’s AI-based autonomy into quarry-sized haul trucks and connects with Komatsu’s Smart Quarry solutions,” Komatsu said.
Pronto also acquired Silicon Valley mining tech start-up SafeAI in 2025. Levandowski described the union as a “talent and technology play”, though SafeAI had dramatically shrunk its workforce after a significant mine deployment contract in Western Australia was abandoned.
“Through our acquisition of SafeAI last year we expanded our capabilities to offer the industry’s first and only tiered autonomous haulage portfolio,” Pronto said this week.
“So, what changes now that we are part of Atoms?
“We are proud to become the core technology engine of the newly formed Atoms Mining division.
“For our existing customers and partners, it is business as usual – but better.
“We will continue to serve our current deployments while gaining access to the broader resources and technical talent of an organization that has spent nearly a decade building at the intersection of AI, robotics, manufacturing and real estate.”
Kalanick said mining was “exactly the kind of massive, physical, essential industry where intelligent machines can make an outsized difference – not someday, but right now”.
“What drew us to Pronto is what draws us to every problem at Atoms: the opportunity to build specialised, gainfully employed robots that do real work in the real world.
“This acquisition is the bedrock of Atoms Mining and a clear signal of how we intend to digitise the physical world one industry at a time.”
