Travis Kalanick’s robotics company Atoms has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz will join the company’s board of directors following the investment.

Bain Capital, Fifth Wall and others participated in the round.

Perhaps most notably, Uber also joined the funding round, reconnecting Kalanick with the company he founded, and the same company that fired him as CEO in 2017 following allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace.

Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company built around the project Kalanick has been working on since he quit Uber, a ghost kitchen play called Cloud Kitchens. When he revealed the new name in March, Kalanick announced that he had acquired Pronto, the heavy industry automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski.

Kalanick has also said he wants to get into atom mining, going beyond what Pronto already does with vehicles in that industry. Last year, Kalanick was reported to be interested in buying the U.S. subsidiary of Uber-backed Chinese autonomous vehicle company Pony AI. The Information reported in March that those talks had ended.

In a post on X about the fundraiser, Kalanick didn’t go into detail about what he wants to build with Atoms.

“On many levels, this round is unfinished business. Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc that we started in Uber, continued in CloudKitchens, and now will end in Atoms,” Kalanick wrote. “16 years ago, I began a journey to digitize the physical world. Understand, predict and control the physical world with software. Build ‘atom-based’ computers where the CPU is manufacturing, storage is real estate and the network is transportation.”

Kalanick has said he wants to build a “wheelbase for robots” with Atoms.

“Travis is back,” Ben Horowitz declared in a simultaneous post on Wednesday. “It takes a rare type of entrepreneur to change these stodgy, old-school parts of our economy. They need a fearless work ethic, drive, and reach that spans all domains, from software architecture to mechanical engineering. Travis is that guy,” Horowitz said.

Horowitz wrote that atoms will aim to make people more productive in the physical world.

“I think the most valuable thing anyone could do with AI and robotics is to repeat what Uber did for transportation, or what computers did for the digital world: make everything and everyone more productive”says his post.

Kalanick didn’t go into specifics, but it appears a good portion of the funds will go toward recruiting.

“The change makers, the builders of tomorrow’s progress machines, will inevitably face the ultimate boss, nature and its fierce resistance to change. Nature will throw everything it has at the builders in this new industrial age and it will take humanity’s strongest to stay the course and get these complex systems and industries over the finish line,” he wrote.