At a rich summit held in Los Angeles last week, billionaire entrepreneur Travis Kalanick rarely got a glimpse into his vision for the future of his latest company, Cloudkitchens. Today, the 8-year-old LA-based outfit is known for its growing real estate portfolio using restaurants using kitchens to achieve food delivery, but Kalanick hinted at the future of full-stacks. In fact, he appears to be aiming to ultimately provide AI-filled food directly to his customers.
Kalanick has covered the topic twice in different contexts. First, during an informal sit-in with Peter Diamandis, the conference organizer, he portrayed similarities between Cloudkitchen and previous turmoil in other industries. He noted that taxi apps existed before Uber, but said their mistake was trying to take a “slice” of existing markets. He explained that the market is small and unreliable, as taxis can easily bypass the app. Karanick also referred to gaming company Zynga. This initially built the business on Facebook’s platform, but was later damaged by the social media giant.
Turning to CloudKitchens, he noted that restaurants that rely on Uber meals and Doordash face similar challenges. “You’re getting yield optimizations for something built for something else,” he said. If you are “on someone else’s platform,” he warned, “they can squeeze you.”
Later, when the audience asked Kalanick about the future of CloudKitchens and the use of AI, Kalanick again hinted that Cloudkitchens was not happy to offer turnkey restaurant space forever. He talked about cooking as a service, for example. Just as driving has become a service instead of doing it for all of us — and claimed that healthy food will be available to everyone.
He also speaks at a high level about the role of AI in transforming the physical world, highlighting what Karanick called “Atom AI” such as “bit AI” (AI chatbots such as chatgpt, deepseek, and grok).
Unfortunately, rather than thrust further, Diamandis moved on to the next attendee’s question. And Kalanick has not responded to requests for details yet. But if the ultimate idea is to serve customers with optimized breakfast, lunch and dinner, Karanick is not the only billionaire. Famous e-commerce entrepreneur Mark Lua has raised a large amount of money for the venture.
When New York-based costume acquired delivery service Grubhub last November, Lore told TechCrunch that Wonder “is aiming to manage what you eat and your health in a way that has never been done before.”
In the same face-to-face interview, Lore has become extremely detailed and portrayed a future in which AI-driven meal plans are seamlessly integrated with customer dietary preferences, health goals and wearable device data. Describe an AI system that can adjust dietary recommendations based on real-time health data, such as blood test results showing high mercury levels, he said Wonder’s “big vision” is a “diet super app.”
It sounded like a fantasy back then. The idea is to wake up to a personalized, health-centric diet plan designed by AI. However, Kalanick and Lore have a track record of disrupted industries that appear to be unfair to disruption. Kalanick is Uber and Lore at Jets.com. If they are targeting the same future – if AI-driven foodservice is a complete replacement for traditional cooking, this shift adds credibility to the idea that it may not be a “if” issue but a “when” issue.
In the meantime, Kalanick has attracted the attention of other founders who want to learn from him. Before Karanick finished his speech last week, after Karanick previously said “better to be early on is worse than wrong,” Karanick asked Karanick about the more “unknown truth.” He didn’t hesitate to answer the questions. He said it is important to “see things that no one else does” to build a big company. Karanick continues. “We have to see the difference between perception and reality. Everyone thinks reality is here, but in reality it’s over there.”
Wonder has so far raised $1.6 billion from investors. CloudKitchens reportedly raised a similar amount of funding, but they are nervous about everything so far.
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