self-storage
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Ayash Basu Is Bringing a Photographer’s Eye to Public Storage’s Revenue Machine
After two decades of advising brands, building a photography marketplace and documenting people in the street, Ayash Basu has taken on a different kind of frame: pricing, brand and customer experience across Public Storage. His career suggests that growth begins with learning what deserves attention.
The Land Nobody Wanted in 1991 Is Now a 1.8-Gigawatt Bet
Leon Backes started Provident by buying land nobody wanted from failed savings-and-loans. Thirty-plus years and $7.5 billion later, the same patient-money playbook is building a 5,000-acre town and one of Texas's largest data center campuses.
The Real Estate Fund That Still Believes in the Telephone
Patriot Holdings built a national portfolio from an old-fashioned edge: call property owners, understand the awkward problem behind each sale, then operate the asset yourself. Its bet is that boring buildings can become a durable wealth machine when the buyer answers the phone and stays for the hard part.
The Guy Who Got Paralyzed, Then Turned Storage Units Into a $350M Machine
AJ Osborne was paralyzed and on life support in his mid-30s. The storage units he owned kept paying his family the whole time. Cedar Creek Capital is what he built next.
The Firm That Bet on Boring and Made $41 Billion
Founded in 1984, Kayne Anderson built a $41 billion alternatives platform by specializing in the unglamorous middle market - oil wells, storage units, and student housing - where cash flow, not hype, does the talking.
The Orange Doors That Turn Life’s Overflow Into a $4.8 Billion Business
Public Storage built a national business around the awkward months when people have more life than room. Now a new leadership team is using software, data science and a much larger portfolio to decide what the familiar orange doors become next.
Dayna Hathaway
She started at Extra Space Storage buying Yellow Pages ads. Twenty-six years later she runs marketing for the biggest self-storage company in the country.
Extra Space Storage
America's largest self-storage operator has turned spare rooms into a national operating system - pairing green doors with dynamic pricing, property management, lending and one of real estate's broadest rooftop-solar programs.
PropRise
PropRise is a San Francisco AI company (YC S23) building software for institutional commercial real estate teams. Its two live products, Primer and Beacon, automate the Excel-heavy grind of dealmaking: Primer turns offering memos, rent rolls and T-12s into underwriting models with every number cited back to its source, while Beacon scans roughly 450,000 U.S. trade areas to surface self-storage sites that match a firm's buy-box. Founded by ex-Stripe machine-learning and engineering leads, PropRise is used by teams behind $50B+ in CRE, including Bain Capital, Colliers and Public Storage.
WheeKeep
WheeKeep is a Jeddah-based tech-enabled storage company that brings the storage unit to the customer. It drops off weatherproof, lockable containers at homes and businesses, lets people pack at their own pace, then collects and stores the units in secured, CCTV-monitored facilities across Saudi Arabia. Combining physical logistics with a mobile app for scheduling, delivery and retrieval, WheeKeep offers ambient and refrigerated units for both personal and commercial use, positioning itself in the growing on-demand self-storage market in the Kingdom.
Cubby
Cubby is an AI-native software platform built specifically for the self-storage industry. Founded in 2022 by Matt Engfer and Adam Fleming and headquartered in New York City, it replaces the sector's aging legacy systems with a single operating platform that unifies facility management, online rentals, revenue management, call handling and autonomous Voice AI. Cubby now serves more than 400 operators managing roughly 450,000 units across North America, and in January 2026 raised a $63 million Series A led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives.
Stuf Storage
Stuf is a New York-based, tech-enabled self-storage company that partners with commercial and multifamily real estate owners to convert underused space - basements, garages, mechanical floors, vacant retail - into remotely managed, hospitality-inspired storage for the people and businesses nearby. Founded in 2020 by CEO Katharine Lau, Stuf runs a lean, app-driven operation across dense urban markets and shares revenue with landlord partners rather than owning or building traditional storage facilities.
Katharine Lau
Katharine Lau is the CEO and co-founder of Stuf, a tech-enabled self-storage company that turns underused space inside commercial buildings into neighborhood storage. She started Stuf in New York in 2020 after a pandemic spring-cleaning session exposed how clunky and inconvenient traditional storage had become. Before Stuf, Lau led real estate growth at the shared-workspace company Industrious and worked across institutional and proptech real estate. Stuf has raised roughly $12.8 million, including an $11 million Series A in 2023, and operates in major U.S. metros from New York to Seattle.
Matt Engfer
Matt Engfer is the co-founder and CEO of Cubby, an AI-native operating platform for self-storage facilities based in New York. After stints in enterprise client success at commercial real estate software firm VTS and an art-sales side hustle that put him inside three storage units and left him baffled by the industry's technology, he started Cubby in 2022 with Adam Fleming. Cubby now serves more than 400 operators managing over 500,000 units across the U.S. and Canada, and raised a $63M Series A led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives in early 2026.
Nick Huber
Nick Huber is the founder of the Sweaty Startup brand and creator of Bolt Storage, a self-storage private equity firm managing 68+ facilities across 11 states. A Cornell track athlete turned anti-Silicon-Valley entrepreneur, he built a $25M+ net worth by 34 through boring, service-based businesses - self-storage, offshore staffing, and cost segregation - while preaching contrarian gospel to 820,000+ followers across social platforms.