The engineer who stole 14,000 files from Google — and dodged prison with a Trump pardon — just landed a piece of Travis Kalanick’s $1.7B empire
You never know when you’ll find yourself back in business with a former colleague.
For Uber co-founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick, his latest venture is bringing together people from his past — including a former Uber employee who was charged after stealing 14,000 files on his laptop as he jumped ship from Google.
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Kalanick announced this week that his robotics company, Atoms, had raised $1.7 billion in a funding round that is backed by venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, and others including Bain Capital, Fifth Wall and … Uber.
Kalanick was forced to step down as CEO of Uber in 2017 after complaints arose about the company’s workplace culture, including discrimination and sexual harassment.
Focus on robotics
In 2018, Kalanick invested $150 million in City Storage Systems, giving him a controlling interest in the company, which at the time had a focus of redeveloping real estate.
The company was rebranded as Atoms in March of this year, with Kalanick announcing it would have a new focus on robotics in the mining and transportation industries. Then, in April, Atoms acquired Pronto, a heavy industry automation firm founded in 2018 by Anthony Levandowski.
Levandowski, described by TechCrunch as “one of Silicon Valley’s most infamous characters,” gained said infamy at Google, as a pioneer of self-driving technology. He then heightened his infamous reputation when he was investigated for and charged with stealing trade secrets when he left Google to start self-driving tech firm Otto, which was then acquired by Uber.
He was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2020, after a plea agreement that saw him plead guilty to one of 33 charges of trade secrets theft against him in a federal indictment.
“Levandowski admitted that in 2016, as he was preparing to leave Google, he downloaded thousands of Project Chauffer (sic) [now known as Waymo] files onto his personal laptop,” a 2020 release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of California says.
At his sentencing, U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who, according to an NBC report, “has been involved in Silicon Valley litigation for nearly five decades,” called Levandowski’s conviction the “biggest trade secret crime [he had] ever seen.”
Levandowski was later pardoned by President Donald Trump on the last day of his first term.
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Together at last?
In a July 22 blog post about the $1.7-billion funding round for Atoms, Kalanick doesn’t focus on Levandowski, however. He spotlights the backing of Andreessen Horowitz, which he calls “a bit of unfinished business.”
That’s because the venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, was set to invest in Uber in 2011, but the firm changed the terms of the deal shortly before it was due to be signed, and instead of capitulating, Kalanick walked.
Now, with Andreessen Horowitz, Uber and Levandowski all on board, Kalanick says Atoms is set to complete his “journey to digitize the physical world.”
He touts Atoms as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) “that builds atoms-based computers for all the major industrial sectors.”
“The vision is about the coming industrial revolution where large industrial economic sectors get completely digitized,” Kalanick writes.
