Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick wants to build a better strip mall.
On Tuesday (March 21), Kalanick announced that he had invested $150 million through his personal investment fund in City Storage Systems, a company that buys distressed real estate assets, such as parking lots and strip malls, and turns them into spaces for businesses of the “digital era,” such as ecommerce companies. Kalanick will run the company as CEO.
“There are over $10 trillion in these real estate assets that will need to be repurposed for the digital era in the coming years,” Kalanick said in a statement he tweeted.
Kalanick’s $150 million investment will buy out most other outside investors, reports Recode, citing an anonymous source.
City Storage Systems overlaps with Kalanick’s former company in the food delivery space. In Kalanick’s statement, he named food services are one industry that will be a focus (one of the company’s existing assets is called CloudKitchens), and the 15-person company already partners with Uber’s food delivery service, UberEats, according to a tweet from current Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Kalanick left Uber as CEO in June 2017 under pressure from company shareholders. Earlier this month, he announced a personal venture fund called 10100, which he said would be focused on “large-scale job creation.” He described the City Storage Systems investment as the fund’s first “big bet” in the real estate space.