More flexible than co-working
We offer companies to rent offices in ordinary business centers through them.
Why do we need an intermediary for this?
Because our product allows you to rent an office not only "permanently", but even for a few days a week. And the rest of the days in this office may be inhabited by some other company, which also needs an office for several, but other days a week.
The business center itself is unlikely to bother with such non-permanent tenants. Therefore, the startup becomes a kind of laying - they rent space for full time and rent them out "by day". Now we already have contracts with a hundred business centers in Dubai.
Moreover. We offer companies to rent not one large office, but several small ones - each of which is in the maximum proximity to the place of residence of a certain number of employees who will drive close or even come on foot to this office.
At the same time, we take care of the initial equipment and routine maintenance of such offices - from creating an interior and supplying furniture to cleaning and providing office kitchens with tea, coffee and cookies. A specific set of necessary services is negotiated at the conclusion of a lease agreement.
The lease agreement itself with our company may no longer be long-term. Such contracts can now begin from 6 months. Then you can extend the contract, terminate it or move to another office - smaller, bigger or in another area.
In the current round, a similar startup Codi in the United States raised $16 million from the venture fund a16z, bringing the total investment to $21 million.
What's interesting
During the pandemic, remote work ceased to be exotic and became a reality.
But how can companies adapt to this reality? To abandon the office and completely switch to remote work mode, or start driving employees back to the usual old big office?
Both options seem stupid already.
As a compromise, there was a hybrid office option - which became something of a private coworking. At the same time, the company dramatically reduces the size of its office, allows employees to work remotely - but leaves a place where employees can come to work from time to time, communicate with other members of their teams or just plunge into the team.
To do this, companies have become needed platforms for booking workplaces and negotiations. First, in order for everyone to come to the office to fit in a new smaller office. And secondly, so that employees can see which of the colleagues is going to be in the office when to be able to meet him at this moment.
One of the first examples of such platforms, which we wrote about last summer, is Café. But since then, many similar platforms have appeared.
The option seems quite good. But there was an unexpected problem with him.
During the forced remote work - while the employees were sitting and working at home - they were "lazy" and ceased to consider the long way to the office a harsh necessity that they are obliged to put up with. And so much so that half of the people began to declare that they would rather leave the company if it forced them to spend a couple of hours a day on a trip to the office and back, and they will no longer work in such a company.
One office in the city in one location in such a situation no longer "plays" - many employees will get to it for a long time, even from time to time.
Our product allows companies to open several of their "private coworking spaces" in different parts of the city so that all employees have the opportunity to quickly reach or even reach any of them.
However, the company will no longer want to maintain several such offices on its own - it is too expensive and difficult. Therefore, it is important that our startup takes on this work.
Theoretically, an alternative may be when a company abandons its one office to solve this problem, but rents jobs for its employees in several local conventional coworking spaces.
But general coworking is still not a private office. Strangers are grinding around - crampedness, fuss, it is difficult to discuss confidential topics, there is no sense of "own place".
One will do something else - but the team is already uncomfortable. And periodic personal meetings with the team and colleagues are important. Working alone, you involuntarily start "catching" and limping. Online meetings and meetings are not exactly what they are. Personal communication is much richer and often helps to find an unexpected topic in a relaxed conversation and make a breakthrough in your head.
So the appearance of a temporary (at least one day a week) private, equipped and close to home place to work together with colleagues, which is rented on flexible terms, is a good option for both employees and the company.
It seems that an old model of "time sharing" has come to the office real estate market, according to which it used to be fashionable to buy holiday homes in order to "own" them a few weeks a year. But here instead of owning - rent.
"Time sharing" instead of "coworking" - and why not?
Where to run
The growing popularity of remote work should inevitably hit business centers - a congress of tenants and a decrease in the size of rented offices.
In such a situation, they should be grateful to the intermediaries who will help them solve the problems that have arisen - for example, by implementing the business model of today's startup. At the same time, as we said above, the business centers themselves are unlikely to be ready to take on the complexity of independent manual fuss with such temporary tenants.
Although it is possible that over time they will have nowhere to go. And then today's startup may well turn from an intermediary into a marketplace and platform (SaaS), with the help of which the business centers themselves will begin to lease their space according to this model.
But it's not scary. After all, such a startup will still continue to make money on this model - and even without the risks associated with mediation in the form of unleased space. The main thing is that the model of temporary and decentralized offices itself flies, and business centers have already started working with such a startup. And then in the course of the play it will be possible to figure out which of them and on what they will make money today.
Anyway, we've already started talking to business centers...
Starter plan
- Contribute this product
- Includes INFINITI' Starter plan
- Last round: $16M, 15.09.2022
- Total investment: $21M, rounds: 4