Travis Kalanick is reportedly starting up a new self-driving vehicle company with “major backing” from Uber, according to The Information. He has reportedly told people he “wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo,” per the report.
The Uber founder is also considering acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former colleague at the ride-hailing company, Anthony Levandowski. Last year, Kalanick was said to be interested in buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI with backing from Uber, though The Information said Friday that those talks ended.
Uber didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 after a confluence of crises at the ride-hail company. At the time, the company was plagued by complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, which sparked an external investigation that resulted in more than 20 employees being fired.
Before that, Kalanick had created a self-driving division at Uber in 2015. Levandowski played a big role in that project after Kalanick lured him away from Google. Uber was ultimately sued by Google for stealing secrets related to its own self-driving car project (which eventually became Waymo). The two companies settled, but Levandowski was criminally charged and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in the affair. The engineer received a last-minute pardon from President Trump at the end of his first term.
The company kept working on the project after Kalanick resigned, including after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018. Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, shuttered and sold the division to autonomous trucking company Aurora in 2020.
In a rare interview in March 2025, Kalanick expressed regret that Uber had abandoned developing its own self-driving cars.
