Jeff Holden

Holden studied computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1991 and a master’s degree in 1992. In 2019 the university’s computer science department gave him its Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award.⁠[1][1]

After graduating, Holden joined the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. as a software engineer working under Jeff Bezos; together they built the firm’s “third market” business, the off-board trading of listed stocks, which launched in less than a year. He then developed a proprietary middleware system and application framework, on which he built applications including a client trading system for smaller partners, a real-time ticker for traders and a trade capture-and-execution system.⁠[1][1][1]

Holden joined Amazon in 1997 as the company’s tenth engineer. Early on he led the development of Amazon’s supply chain and fulfillment technology, taking it from a shell script, a command-line binary and a modem to the architecture that remained in long-term use.⁠[1][2][1]

In the latter part of his tenure he was senior vice president of consumer applications, worldwide, responsible for the consumer experience across Amazon’s websites, including personalization, ordering, community, search, automated merchandising and online traffic such as the Associates program and search marketing. He regards leading the development of Amazon Prime as one of his proudest accomplishments of that period.⁠[1][1][1][3]

In 2006 Holden left Amazon to found Pelago, where he was chief executive. Its flagship product, Whrrl, was a location-based check-in app designed to apply Amazon-style recommendation technology to the real world and help users discover the best places in their cities. Pelago raised $22.4 million from investors including T-Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Bezos Expeditions.⁠[1][1][4][4]

On April 18, 2011, the daily-deals site Groupon announced that it had acquired Pelago for an undisclosed price. Holden took charge of product development at Groupon, the Pelago team joined Groupon’s new-product efforts, and Whrrl shut down on April 30 that year. Groupon chief executive Andrew Mason praised Holden’s understanding of consumer buying behavior and of the importance of user experience. Holden went on to serve as Groupon’s senior vice president of product management until 2014.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][1]

On February 14, 2014, Uber announced it had hired Holden as chief product officer, reporting to chief executive Travis KalanickTravis KalanickTravis Kalanick is an American entrepreneur, a co-founder of the ride-hailing platform Uber, and Uber’s chief executive officer from 2010 to 2017. He drove Uber’s expansion to hundreds of cities worldwide with a hard-line approach to taxi regulation, resigned as CEO in 2017 amid scandals over company culture and pressure from investors, and left the board in 2019. He went on to lead City Storage Systems, the parent company of CloudKitchens, which he reorganized in 2026 into the robotics and artificial intelligence company Atoms.Open the full entry and leading the product team in San Francisco; he was Uber’s first chief product officer. Announcing the hire, Kalanick said Holden had experienced Amazon’s early hyper-growth and knew how to “think big while building for the long-term,” and that his own experience as an entrepreneur was the icing on the cake. Holden said Uber’s vision went far beyond what was then visible.⁠[3][3][2][3][3][3]

Holden was involved in launching uberPOOL, Uber’s ride-sharing feature that lets users split rides with strangers for a cheaper fare; on April 22, 2015, as Uber’s chief product officer, he discussed the service with host Jeremy Hobson on public radio station WBUR’s Here & Now.⁠[5][6][6][6]

On October 27, 2016, Uber published a nearly 100-page white paper proposing on-demand urban air transportation using vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. Introducing it, Holden wrote that on-demand aviation could radically improve urban mobility and give people back time lost to commuting, and said Uber did not intend to build the aircraft itself but to collaborate with vehicle developers, regulators, governments and communities. The effort, later known as Uber Elevate, was spearheaded by him.⁠[7][7][7][7][1]

At Uber, Holden founded the Advanced Technology Group that developed the company’s self-driving technology, led the development of Uber Eats from its inception, and created Uber AI Labs. On December 5, 2016, Uber acquired Geometric Intelligence, a startup co-founded by academics including New York University cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, and used its staff of about 15 as the core of a new central AI lab at its San Francisco headquarters. Holden wrote that every part of Uber’s business faced the common “high-order intelligence problem” of negotiating the real world.⁠[1][1][8][8][8][8]

In May 2018 Uber held its second Elevate summit, where Holden held a conversation with Federal Aviation Administration acting administrator Dan Elwell about regulation for uberAIR, the planned air-taxi service; under his leadership Uber had also brought in Eric Allison, chief executive of the flying-taxi startup Zee Aero.⁠[9][10][10]

A week after the summit Holden left Uber, with May 17 as his last day. An Uber spokesperson did not give a reason, saying only that Elevate was now led by Eric Allison and would continue as before. Holden, whom former chief executive Travis Kalanick had recruited from Groupon, was the latest of more than a dozen senior executives to leave Uber since 2017, as new chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi worked to repair the company’s reputation after a series of scandals.⁠[10][11][11][9][11][11][11]

On October 7, 2026, Atomic Machines, the company Holden founded and leads as chief executive, emerged after six years of stealth development and announced that it had raised $250 million to date, without disclosing a valuation or the breakdown by round; investors include OneIM, Gigafund, XTX Ventures, KAS Venture Partners, Valor Equity Partners, Sozo Ventures and the Regents of the University of California. Its core is an AI-native manufacturing system called the Matter Compiler, which builds micro-machines with moving parts, multiple materials and features down to single-digit microns directly from code, without molds, masks or other fixed tooling.⁠[2][2][2][2]

Holden said the name Matter Compiler is a tip of the hat to science fiction author Neal StephensonNeal StephensonNeal Stephenson is an American author of science fiction and historical fiction whose best-known works include Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle. He coined the term “metaverse” in Snow Crash (1992), and his novels are known for their detailed imagining of technology and the information society, influencing generations of technologists; he also took part in the early work of Blue Origin, served as Magic Leap’s chief futurist and co-founded the blockchain platform Lamina1.Open the full entry and the matter compiler imagined in his novel The Diamond Age; the company is building “the real, bounded, near-term beginning” of that idea, starting at the microscale. He likens the system to the ribosome, which builds proteins from a genetic code: the design lives in data rather than in hardware, the marginal cost of a new design is the cost of writing it down, and every operation the system performs is measured so that errors are caught and corrected instead of compounding.⁠[12][2][2][12][12][12]

The Matter Compiler sits in a small industrial facility in Emeryville, California, and consists of a chain of 13 automated manufacturing machines that build and test a device’s components, while an AI system analyzes large numbers of materials experiments to find viable device designs. For now engineers still move components between machines and help assemble the final device, which the company hopes the machines will eventually do on their own; the company says that the more devices it builds, the more data it generates, and that data is used to improve the manufacturing process.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13]

Its first product, PrimeSwitch PS-150, is a relay for AI data centers moving to 800-volt direct current; it carries 150 amps of continuous current, opens in 50 microseconds and is shipping to unnamed early-access customers for evaluation. Holden said a matter compiler can make machines that cannot be made by other means; he envisions tiny gears and motors driving “microrobots” for uses such as surgery, and even a device that runs medical tests on a few drops of blood, the product once promised by Theranos, which he said requires a different kind of manufacturing technology.⁠[2][2][2][2][13][13][13][13]

Holden has written that he began watching Star TrekStar TrekStar Trek is a science-fiction franchise originating in the work of Gene Roddenberry. Its central subjects include exploration aboard starships, encounters across cultures and humanity’s future. It spans television, film, animation and other media, with a long-established fan community.Open the full entry at the age of five and came to believe that exploration in pursuit of knowledge is a powerful purpose in itself. He argues that civilizational progress rests on three axes, the command of energy, information and matter, and that matter is the axis the other two run on and where their value is cashed in; in his account, below the microscale essentially the only industrial capability is semiconductor fabrication, leaving micro-machines that move, pump, heat, focus and sense effectively unmanufacturable, which is why he founded Atomic Machines, whose mission is “on-demand universal command of matter.”⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12][12]

As of October 2026, Holden is a member of the board of directors of Boom Supersonic, the supersonic aircraft company.⁠[14][14][15]

Atomic Machines: Official website: https://www.atomicmachines.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jeffholden (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffholden/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]