Travis Kalanick raises $1.7B for Adams, his industrial AI company automating mining, food, and transport

Travis Kalanick raises $1.7B for Adams, his industrial AI company automating mining, food, and transport

Travis Kalanick's new company, Adams, has closed a $1.7 billion raise to fund what he calls full-stack industrial AI: autonomous vehicles, robotics, and AI software applied to entire industries, starting with mining, food production, and transport. Kalanick says a second close is likely given ongoing investor interest — his phone was still ringing at the time of the conversation.

Adams is the consolidation of several subsidiaries Kalanick had been running separately, including Pronto, which handles autonomous haulage in mining. He originally pitched investors on individual verticals, but the first five he approached all said the same thing: they wanted to back him, not a specific sector. He pulled the entities into a single company and sold equity in that combined structure.

Mining

Pronto's autonomous haulage system has crossed what Kalanick calls the critical threshold — machine productivity beyond human-level output. The pitch to a gold mine CEO is direct: would you like 20% more gold per year? He says he hasn't heard no. Once customers demand proof, momentum builds from there.

The go-to-market is physical. Kalanick describes dropping into a Vale iron ore operation in deep northern Brazil — the world's largest iron ore mine by his account — and a phosphate mine on the Iraq-Saudi border where GPS signals were jammed and his pilots had to land on visual approach. Customers are real; the scaling work is in commissioning.

The installation process is genuinely hard. Most mining vehicles are not drive-by-wire — the steering is mechanical and hydraulic — so Adams has to retrofit physical actuation onto machines that were never designed for it. Once sensors and compute are installed and the site is commissioned, Kalanick estimates autonomous operations could push productivity 30 to 40% higher, combining faster machine throughput with fewer staffing disruptions and changed safety protocols.

The long-term target is what the industry calls a no-entry mine: no humans in the pit, with autonomous systems handling haulage, grading, dust suppression, and freight out of the site. Kalanick frames haulage as the cardiovascular system of a mine and describes the broader fleet of moving machines — graders, water trucks, outbound freight — as the natural expansion path.

“I announced earlier today we did a $1,700,000,000 raise. We are gonna do physical automation, physical AI — what we are calling industrial AI — to transform these industries one at a time. We did food, we moved into mining, we're doing transport. The Pronto technology has gotten past human productivity, which means you go to a gold mine CEO and say, would you like to have 20% more gold per year? Haven't heard no.”

Food and transport

On food, Adams is pursuing full-stack automation of production and delivery. Robotic food production in industrial real estate feeds into what Kalanick calls autonomous burritos — temperature-controlled wheeled couriers that bring food directly to homes. His cost estimate for autonomous last-mile delivery is 75 cents per drop, against roughly $12 for a current Uber Eats or DoorDash delivery.

Transport sits underneath both verticals. Kalanick describes it as wheelbase for robots: specialized industrial tasks at scale require wheels, not humanoids, and Adams builds the mobility layer for its own operations. He gives the example of a company — unnamed — spending $3.5 billion a year on forklift labor across its facilities as an illustration of the supply-chain automation opportunity.

Business model and pricing

Kalanick's commercial logic follows enterprise software: a baseline subscription with outcome-based upside. His advice is blunt — never ask a customer for a percentage of their output. Price the product, then negotiate incremental fees tied to demonstrated performance. The more differentiated the value, the more you can charge.

Jobs and the economic argument

Kalanick pushes back on the displacement framing. His argument is straightforward: automation drives prices down, which leaves more money in people's pockets, which creates demand for other things that humans still do. He expects a thousand new job categories to emerge, including ones that don't exist yet, as long as there are tasks robots can't handle. He thinks there will be plenty.

Regulation

On federal preemption versus state-by-state regulation, Kalanick is skeptical of federal standardization. He argues that companies pushing for federal regulatory frameworks are usually doing it to crowd out competitors, not to open markets. At Uber, he says, they never proposed rules that would benefit them over rivals — they tried to open the market and let competition decide.

He's sharper on incumbent interests in transport. Trial lawyers and insurance companies, he argues, have historically shaped bad transport regulation in their favor. He points to Uber's experience in Washington DC, where regulators pushed a $1.5 million liability policy per ride against a standard taxi liability of roughly $25,000 — a gap that benefited both insurers and plaintiff attorneys.

Hiring

On executive hiring, Kalanick's filter is problem-solving ability over organizational management. He argues that someone who manages well but can't solve problems will run a beautifully organized disaster. His model: the CEO is problem-solver-in-chief, taking on the highest-impact unsolved problems personally, and every direct report is a deputized version of the same. He simulates working together during the interview process so that the first day on the job functions like week two.

Adams is still early but moving fast across three industries simultaneously. The $1.7 billion gives Kalanick the capital to go from what he calls "lean to muscular" — adding the enterprise sales infrastructure and on-the-ground commissioning capacity that mining customers are already asking for.