EV Hive was founded in 2015 by venture capital firm East Ventures to provide office spaces for its portfolio companies

Indonesia-based coworking space chain EV Hive announced today that it has raised a US$20 million Series A funding round, following up the US$3.7 million pre-Series A funding round it has raised in September 2017.

Led by Softbank Ventures Korea, the funding round includes new investors H&CK Partners, Tigris Investment, Naver, LINE Ventures and STIC Investments.

Existing investors East Ventures, SMDV, Sinar Mas Land, Insignia Venture Partners, Intudo Ventures, and private tech-focussed angel investors Michael Widjaya and Chris Angkasa also participated in the round.

In a press statement, EV Hive said that it plans to use new funding to:

1. Accelerate regional expansion plan with the goal to launch 100 locations throughout Southeast Asia (SEA) by 2022, including Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand.

2. Launch new business verticals across co-sharing platforms in residential, retail, and storage.

3. Implement re-branding to reflect the company’s “evolution” as an independent player in Indonesia’s coworking space sector. The coworking space chain was founded in 2015 by East Ventures to provide office spaces for its portfolio companies; it was spun-off in 2017.

Also Read: EV Hive has a new coworking space — and it is located inside a post office

In an email to e27, EV Hive CEO and Co-Founder Carlson Lau explained their SEA expansion strategy.

“We believe that coworking in SEA is a very localised business, and finding and working with great community leaders in each city is key to ensuring that we bring the right pool of members to each location. We have already identified a few of these influencers in each of the cities we want to be, and are eager to roll out in these areas over the next few months,” he wrote.

Lau also explained more details about the company’s plan to launch new business verticals.

“As we build out our coworking business, we have developed many in-house capabilities across community building, design, and operations that can be applied to other residential, retail, and storage verticals using our experience with developing businesses in the sharing economy. We plan to execute on these plans within the next six to 12 months,” he explained.

EV Hive claimed to manage over 3,000 square meters of workspace in 21 locations in Jakarta and Medan, up from two in May 2017, with eight additional locations under construction.

It has two types of arrangement with landlords that own the space for their coworking facility: It either rents the space or enters a revenue-sharing agreement with the owner.

The coworking space chain said that it currently has over 3,000 active members.

“Our new members typically join us through recommendations from existing members. As we continue to grow our member base, we are fortunate to experience strong network effects from existing members drawing in new members,” Lau said.

Also Read: East Ventures, Yahoo! Japan Capital, and SMDV launch EV Growth

Coworking space in Indonesia is a rapidly growing yet challenging sector, with more global players announcing their entry to the market in the past few years.

Lau shared what he believed to be the keys to running a successful one in the country.

“By being very close to our members, listening to their requirements, and understanding their pain points, we have innovated continuously in our community building programmes, service offerings, and space planning. Most of our members are first time users of organised commercial spaces – where previously they were working out of their apartments or cafes, we have managed to attract them to utilise our spaces,” he said.

“Compared to other SEA markets which are dominated by large enterprises, Indonesia is a very unique market in that most of the working adult population are working in SMEs – for a working population of 118 million people, we have 59 million companies of which 58 million are SMEs. Architected well, coworking is a very powerful platform for these SMEs to share resources and gain affordable access to services,” he added.

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