One of Louisville’s burgeoning startups has been acquired.
Cartainers — a company that is constructing high-end, customizable containers to ship, transport or display elite luxury sports cars — has finalized a deal to be purchased by New York-based HK Motorcars, according to co-founder Zach Jenkins.
The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but it was revealed that out of the current leadership team at Cartainers, only Jenkins is expected to remain with the new ownership in a to-be-determined position.
Jenkins referred to HK Motorcars — based out of Mount Kisco, New York, in the New York City metro area — as “a high-end boutique global dealer” of ultra-luxury sports cars. The company’s website features seven brands, all of which are unknown to most of the general public for both their scarcity and sticker price (ranging from $650,000 to upwards of $4 million). Brands include SSC North America, Kimera Automobili and Glickenhouse.
“Getting to know them, they check all the boxes,” Jenkins said. “They’re very well connected in this pretty niche category. … They have really good relationships with some major car country clubs in North America, and they have a lot of really good connections when it comes to manufacturing. … There’s a ton of really good overlap and a lot of benefits for what Cartainers is trying to do — having incredibly bespoke high-end auto manufacturers in our network and as potential partners.”
Jenkins — who co-founded the company with Justin Delaney and Angi Patel in 2022 — said that it was “unexpected” that HK Motorcars wanted to acquire the company, after initially talking about them adding to their next round of capital. You can get more details of the company’s background in a profile written by Assistant Managing Editor-Digital Haley Cawthon back in January 2023.
As we previously reported, Cartainers was a portfolio company of Wabi Capital, which is an investment firm that was launched by Delaney and Brook Smith in 2022. Patel also is one of Wabi’s investors. Smith was named one of our 2023 Inno Fire Awards winners.
Delaney disclosed that Cartainers had raised $750,000 in capital before the company started negotiations with HK Motorcars.
"Every company that Brook and I work on tend to be cool companies, interesting brands, interesting products and I think our thesis at Wabi is to invest in those things because they always find a way of selling," Delaney told me. "Every company that I ever been a part of has had a transaction because we've only been a part of things that are interesting. ... Cool products always win."
I first spoke to Cartainers President Sarah Blasi back in November when the startup was preparing for a formal launch of its first product line, the Ceres 001 line, through a series of events taking place around the annual Art Basel event in Miami Beach, Florida, from Dec. 8-10.
The company launched its website on Dec. 6, which was accompanied by press push to industry publications and the start of a pre-order list (which then was stopped after negotiations began with HK Motorcars).
The products range from $50,000 for the base model to $100,000 for extra amenities, such as temperature control and security battery backup, Blasi told me back then.
“To see people who have interacted with similar things before they walk up to it, and then the doors open and move,” Jenkins said. “That’s when their jaws drop, and that’s when their eyes light up. And that’s when they look at us, like, ‘Wait, how did that happen?’ ... Then when you start rattling off the features that we put in, there are people who have worked in this industry for 30, sometimes 40-plus years, who are just really wowed because they haven’t seen this type of functionality and this type of product before.”
Although the Cartainers team initially had a business-to-customer (B2C) model in mind (such as personal car collectors), they quickly realized the potential of a business-to-business (B2B) vertical by having car dealerships, luxury car events and auctions as customers.
While all of this was going, the company was still trying to finalize the prototype (in its third iteration) — and what manufacturer would make them. Those decisions all hinged on its acquisition, but Jenkins said that Louisville would still be a major part of the company’s footprint by serving as the quality control location before the containers are delivered to the end customer.
Jenkins said it is still being determined what company would mass-produce containers, but said there are three finalists — with two in the U.S. and one in Italy. The company had made its prototypes in a facility in Middletown off of Old Henry Road.
