Travis Kalanick's ghost kitchen startup ended 2021 with significant fresh funding and a new chief financial officer.
Los Angeles-based CloudKitchens raised about $850 million in a November funding round valuing the startup at $15 billion, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The deal is a significant step up from the startup's last publicly reported valuation of $5 billion in 2019 and marks the latest milestone in Kalanick's comeback, after being ousted from Uber in June 2017 amid reports of a toxic corporate culture. Insider was not able to learn the identities of the investors in the new round backing CloudKitchens, which maintains a deliberately secretive profile. Representatives for CloudKitchens did not respond to requests for comment.
CloudKitchens also tapped John Curran as CFO. He started in November after more than 12 years with Amazon, where he was most recently the CFO for the company's international consumer business, per his LinkedIn profile.
Curran oversees a department that experienced high turnover under finance head Jake Galey, an Uber alumnus. Three controllers exited his team in less than three years, and the head of capital markets left last spring.
A CloudKitchens spokesman declined to comment.
Fundraising rumors were earlier reported by newsletter writers Matt Newberg and Eric Newcomer.
Booming business and employee discontent
Kalanick joined CloudKitchens as chief executive officer in 2018, after his exit from Uber. He bought existing investors out and later brought in $400 million from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund in 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
Current and former employees could not sell back their equity, referred to by the company as "profit units," in the 2021 funding round.
Business at City Storage Systems – CloudKitchens' parent company – has boomed during the pandemic, as diners around the world ordered food for home delivery in record numbers. The company owns more than 50 active locations in the US and dozens more internationally, providing kitchen space that established restaurants and food startups alike can rent and prepare delivery-ready meals from. Customers include major brands like Chik-fil-A and Applebee's.
Competitors like SoftBank-backed Reef are also rapidly building networks of ghost kitchens — sometimes in slipshod fashion — in a race to gain market share in the fast-growing business.
CloudKitchens' software product, Otter, aggregates online orders for both CloudKitchens customers and regular restaurants. One former employee estimated that Otter could be the fastest-growing US software company, though the company keeps specifics on revenue and other metrics close. Kalanick lured top engineers from Apple, Uber, and other companies to work on Otter and other tech efforts.
Despite the company's fast expansion, Kalanick has tried to keep CloudKitchens' plans under wraps, to avoid tipping off competitors, recruiters, and the media. Employees can't add the company to their LinkedIn pages — indeed, Curran's LinkedIn profile says that he's the CFO at a stealth "hyper-growth" startup — and departments often operate in isolation.
The company struggled last year with discontent among some employees about culture and HR policies and with tumultuous relationships with some neighbors, including in Chicago – a battle that's calmed in recent months. The late spring brought some executive changeups: the head of external recruiting resigned in May after an internal investigation into poor conduct, and the head of Americas exited in June for another tech company, Insider previously reported. Most of the company's US recruiting team also left last year.
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