Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber who was ousted after a series of scandals, has made his next big investment, according to reports.
有报道称,Uber创始人特拉维斯·卡兰尼克在一系列丑闻后被罢免,花巨资投了新项目。
Kalanick's real estate company City Storage Systems has bought a stake in Rebel Foods Pvt in India, a cloud kitchen company.
卡兰尼克的房地产公司City Storage Systems已买下印度云厨房Rebel Foods公司的股份。
The deal is part of a $125 million funding round for the company. The business has a valuation of around $525 million and delivers food items to people all over India.
这笔交易是该公司1.25亿美元融资的一部分。该公司估值约为5.25亿美元,为印度各地的人外送食物。
Sequoia, Goldman Sachs and Gojek all participated in the round, and Rebel Foods plans to expand into more areas with the new capital.
红杉资本、高盛和Gojek(叫车服务巨头)都参与了本轮融资,Rebel Foods计划利用新的资金将业务扩展到更多地区。
Cloud kitchens have become a popular business model in India, because of the relatively lower overhead. There are no traditional restaurant staffing costs, and the kitchens don't need to be located in heavy foot-trafficked areas with higher rent.
云厨房因为开销相对较低在印度已成为流行商业模式。省掉了传统餐厅人力成本,厨房也不需要开在人口稠密地区承担高昂的租金。
Since he was removed from Uber, Kalanick started his investment fund and has begun working on a kitchen rental service called CloudKitchens. His name cache and investment are helpful to Rebel because of his past history turning a little fleet of cabs into one of the most famous companies in the world — Uber.
卡兰尼克被赶出Uber后创立了他的投资基金,开始投资名为“云厨房”的共享厨房服务。他的名气和投资对Rebel很有帮助,因为他过去曾将一小队出租车打造成了世界最著名的公司——Uber。
Rebel serves food through a network of "virtual restaurants" that are only available on the internet. It has upwards of 250 cloud kitchens in around 22 Indian cities, and it wants to expand that number to 400 by the end of March 2020.
Rebel通过“虚拟餐厅”网络提供食物,只能在网上点餐。在印度约22个城市中已有超过250家云厨房,并计划到2020年3月底将厨房数量增加到400家。
However, the virtual kitchen space in India is crowded and full of competition. Another popular delivery company in India, Swiggy, is also working on building a network of virtual kitchens. It's backed by companies like Naspers and Tencent Holding. Uber is already doing something similar, delivering from phantom kitchens. Amazon has been looking into the industry and will no doubt leverage its logistics insights and strengths when it decides to move forward.
然而印度的虚拟厨房市场很拥挤,竞争很激烈。印度另外一家受欢迎的外卖公司Swiggy也在打造虚拟厨房网络,它得到了Naspers和腾讯控股有限公司等公司的支持。Uber已经有类似的从虚拟厨房外送的服务了。亚马逊一直在调查这一行业,一旦决定进军这一领域无疑将会利用其物流服务和优势。