ghost-kitchens
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The Studio Betting Your Next Favorite Restaurant Won't Have a Dining Room
Founded in 2020 in El Segundo, DFG Ventures builds delivery-first food brands with celebrities and chefs - and runs the kitchens too. Goop Kitchen is its proof.
Byte
Byte is a Lahore-based food company that owns the whole plate - it cooks its own branded meals inside delivery-only dark kitchens and gets them to customers cheaply and fast. Founded in 2020 by former Uber Pakistan GM Safee Shah, it became the first Pakistani consumer internet startup backed by Y Combinator (S20). Instead of being a marketplace listing other restaurants, Byte runs its own in-house brands - fried chicken, biryani, pizza and wings - which lets it undercut incumbents like Foodpanda while controlling quality end to end.
Nick Anastasiades
Nick Anastasiades is the co-founder and CEO of Benji, a New York-based startup building a universal API for loyalty partnerships - what the industry calls the 'Plaid for loyalty.' Benji lets airlines, hotels, retailers and consumer brands link their rewards systems so members can earn and redeem points across companies, collapsing integrations that once took a year into a matter of days. In May 2026 the company raised a $6.25M seed round and counts JetBlue, CookUnity, 1-800-Flowers and Chip City among a network representing more than 50 million members. Benji is the third company Nick has built with co-founders Jon Elron and Arik Gaisler, following 2ndKitchen, the B2B virtual-kitchen platform acquired by REEF Technology in 2021. Raised in Beirut and trained at UC Berkeley and Northwestern, he is a Forbes Next 1000 entrepreneur and a Chicago Innovation Award winner.
Travis Kalanick
Travis Kalanick is the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, the ride-sharing giant that revolutionized urban transportation worldwide. After a controversial departure from Uber in 2017, he launched CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen infrastructure company, and in March 2026 announced Atoms, a robotics venture focused on food, mining, and transportation. Known for his relentless drive and combative approach to regulation, Kalanick has built multiple billion-dollar companies while stirring controversy over workplace culture and aggressive business tactics.