Coworking spaces and in a broader sense flexible workspaces have been an existing feature of the commercial real estate landscape for decades. Recent years have however seen an acceleration of their growth. In this article we look at the publicly available data on trends in fundraising.
High-level view
Several high-level comments are noticeable:
- The last four years have seen a rapid acceleration in funds raised with the total accumulated amount from 2012 to 2019 reaching close to USD 30 billion.
- The number of the deals has increased steadily but at a slower place than the total amount, showing a higher amount per deal.
- Although not apparent on the following chart, wework (including wework China) makes the bulk of the total funds raised at USD 23.5bn out of a total of USD 27.8bn (84%). We will therefore leave the highly publicised wework development out of scope of this article.
Largest raises
In the following chart we have shown the top 50 raises over the 2012 / 19 period (excluding wework). The distribution shows the long tailed-ness one can often observe with innovative companies. The largest fundraises include Ucommune, Kr Space, Selina, Workspace Group and Industrious.
Geographical distribution
The following chart shows the distribution of fundraises in the world. The three main flexible workspace regions are the US, Europe and Asia with some smaller activity in South America, Africa and Australia. The largest fundraises in our sample (excluding wework) was in China (Ucommune)
CoworkIntel is the performance data co-op for the flexible industry.
Our mission is to help operators build their track record, landlords get clarity on operators performance and investors take informed decisions.
Our vision is to bring transparency to help the flexible workspace industry grow in a more profitable, efficient and sustainable way.
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