Last week, at the Abundance Summit in Los Angeles, billionaire entrepreneur Travis Kalanick gave attendees a rare glimpse into his vision for the future of his newest company, CloudKitchens. While today the eight-year-old L.A.-based outfit is known for a growing real estate portfolio that it uses to it host – and set up – restaurants that use its kitchens to fulfill food deliveries, Kalanick hinted at a full-stack future. In fact, he appears to be aiming to eventually deliver AI-perfected meals directly to customers.
Kalanick brought up the topic twice, in different contexts. First, during his informal sit-down with conference organizer Peter Diamandis, he drew parallels between CloudKitchens and earlier disruptions in other industries. He noted that taxi apps existed before Uber, but said their mistake was trying to take a “slice” of the existing market. That market, he explained, was both small and unreliable, as taxis could easily bypass the apps. Kalanick similarly referenced the gaming company Zynga, which initially built its business on Facebook’s platform, only to be later undermined by the social media giant.
Turning to CloudKitchens, he pointed out that restaurants relying on Uber Eats or DoorDash face a similar challenge. “You’re getting yield optimization on a thing that’s built for something else,” he said. If you’re “on somebody else’s platform,” he warned, “they can squeeze you.”
Later, when an audience member asked Kalanick about the future of CloudKitchens and its use of AI, Kalanick again hinted that CloudKitchens isn’t content to forever provide turn-key restaurant spaces. He talked, for example, about cooking-as-a-service — much like driving has become a service instead of something we all do for ourselves — and insisted that healthy meals will be made available to all and “not just the wealthy.”
He also talked at a high level about AI’s role in transforming the physical world, distinguishing between ‘AI for bits’ (such as AI chatbots like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Grok) and what Kalanick called ‘atoms AI’, meaning AI that interacts with the physical world.
Unfortunately, instead of poke further, Diamandis moved onto the next attendee’s question. And Kalanick hasn’t yet responded to a request for more information. But if the ultimate idea is to deliver customers AI-optimized breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Kalanick isn’t the only billionaire trying: famed e-commerce entrepreneur, Marc Lore, has raised substantial funding for a venture, Wonder, which launched as a spiffed-up ghost kitchen but is steadily expanding its ambitions — and actively talking about it.
Last November, when the New York-based outfit acquired the delivery service GrubHub, Lore told TechCrunch that Wonder is aiming to “put the pieces together to… manage what you eat and your health in a way that’s never been done before.”
During that same in-person interview, Lore went into great detail, painting a future where AI-driven meal planning seamlessly integrates with a customer’s dietary preferences, health goals, and wearable device data. Describing an AI system that could tailor meal recommendations based on real-time health data, such as, say, blood test results indicating high mercury levels, he said that Wonder’s “big vision” is to be “the super app for mealtime.”
It sounded at the time like fantasy, the idea of waking up to a personalized, health-focused meal plan designed by AI. Yet both Kalanick and Lore have track records of disrupting industries that didn’t seem vulnerable to disruption — Kalanick with Uber, and Lore with Jets.com. If they are targeting the same future – one where AI-driven food services fully replace traditional cooking – it adds credibility to the idea that this shift may not be a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.’
In the meantime, Kalanick plainly has the attention of other founders who are eager to learn from him. Before Kalanick wrapped up his talk last week, another eager audience member asked Kalanick for more “unknown truths” after Kalanick earlier told those gathered that “being early is worse than being wrong.” He didn’t hesitate to answer the question, saying that it’s critical to “see something nobody else does” in order to build a big business. Continued Kalanick, “You have to see the difference between perception and reality, where everybody thinks reality is here, but it’s actually over there.”
Wonder has so far raised $1.6 billion from investors. CloudKitchens has reportedly raised a similar amount of funding, though it has been tighter-lipped about everything it’s doing to date.
