After announcing a capital investment fund called ‘10100’ on May 7th intended for investment in startups, Travis Kalanick, former CEO of Uber Technologies sacked by his company in June last year is back on track in the entrepreneur world.
My new gig… pic.twitter.com/vpD528cdyf
— travis kalanick (@travisk) March 20, 2018
Kalanick announced today that he has acquired a real estate company called City Storage Systems for $150 million. His first action after acquiring the firm was to install himself as CEO. The investment represents approximately 10% of his total wealth. In January, Kalanick sold $1.4 billion worth of Uber shares to SoftBank Group Corp.
City Storage Systems is a startup that focuses on redesigning troublesome real estate properties like parking lots or abandoned strip malls and rearranging them into outlets to fulfill the needs of new industries like food delivery or online retail.
The company was called ‘CloudKitchens’ previously and was run by Diego Berdaking, an entrepreneur based in Los Angeles and an early investor in Uber as well. The company boasts a workforce of 15 people and the $150 fueled in the company all but certainly buys out the existing outside investors. According to sources, these investors include Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, who was the most recent investor in the firm before Kalanick’s acquisition.
“There are over $10 trillion in these real estate assets that will need to be repurposed for the digital era,” Kalanick wrote in a tweet announcing the acquisition.