Spacemob is building its future around developing proprietary technology to help the co-working space scale regionally
The Singporean co-working space Spacemob announced today it has raised a US$5.5 million seed funding round led by Vertex Venture Holdings.
Other investors included Alpha JWC Ventures from Indonesia and a number of undisclosed angel investors.
The dollar amount has set a record for the largest seed round ever recorded in Southeast Asia.
Spacemob works to differentiate itself from the competition by developing its own proprietary technology to benefit its tenants.
For example, Spacemob has a full-engineering team including full-stack developers, front-end designers, product managers, etcetera.
The team has integrated wireless payments (buy a coffee on the next visit), meeting bookings via QR code and the team is working on room administration (like locking doors) through a wireless system. It has a ‘members circle’ that allows people to subscribe to add-ons, manage credits, get travel discounts and access additional benefits.
According to Daren Goh, Spacemob’s Head of Marketing, the future plans for the co-working space circle around using technology to solve problems in the co-working space. He explained that this will manifest itself in a LinkedIn/Tinder type of product that will allow people to search for resources or collaboration opportunities through the platform.
“That is the big one for us, and there is a lot more in [the tech features] that is being explored, although it will take us a bit of time to build it,” he told e27.
Last month, Spacemob officially opened the doors to its 15,000 sq. ft. space in downtown Singapore. It plans to open two other sites in Q1 2017 — one in the Science Park district of Singapore and the other in Jakarta.
Fairly recognisable tenants of Spacemob include General Assembly and the Unilever-owned company Big Sync.
Spacemob is led by Turochas “T” Fuad, who was the Founder of the vacation rental platform Travelmob that was acquired by HomeAway in 2013. He has implemented a hotel-esque management model that helps keeps assets (and costs) down while making it easier to scale.
According to Fuad, the idea is to build a web of locations and let people work from any Spacemob across the region. It targets not only startups, but SMEs and corporates who can save money on rent while allowing their employees to work from more creative environments.
“We live in a world where the concept of a shared economy is commonplace, and one that is inhabited by what I call global working citizens,” he said.
“No longer are people limited to working within one structure of space. Spacemob was designed to allow the space to follow you”.
From the perspective of Vertex, the VC Firm sees Spacemob as a tech play more so than real estate. The startup caught the firms eye because of its regional outlook within an industry that has traditionally been locally-focussed.
Usually, there are two types of co-working spaces — stand alone businesses that focus on building a local identity and ‘community building’ assets of a larger company (Vertex itself has a free co-working space called Technopreneur Circle).
The stand-alone co-working spaces become more like small lifestyle businesses and may expand within a city, but rarely look regionally.
So, Spacemob’s core tenant of expanding across Asia — it plans on having 30 sites in the region by 2019 — is fairly unique in Southeast Asia. Plus, it has already been proven that co-working spaces are more than capable of scaling (the global co-working brand WeWork out of New York City has locations from Beijing to Berlin to Boston).
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“Spacemob stood out from other co-sharing players in the market because of their business model and regional expansion plans. With Mr. Fuad’s background and track record in the sharing economy, we are confident that Spacemob will be a rousing success story,” said Chua Kee Lock the Group President and CEO of Vertex.
Spacemob offers its tenants IT, finance, back-end office support and even health insurance plans.
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