The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.
In the good old pre-pandemic times, coworking spaces were trendy. WeWork rose and fell, and the number of small local companies grew stably all over the world. This market grew its own shovel traders – specialized SaaS. Even the most shabby coworking spaces got fancy accounting, and their clients got a fancy mobile app with an opportunity to book negotiations personally.
There have been many automation services like this. To my knowledge, none of them grew big, the market size was just not sufficient. OfficeRnD, an English startup of the day, created a service pretty similar to the rest and did not stand out among others. It launched in 2015, in 2019 it matured enough for a USD 3M round. Not nearly a significant amount by local measures, many bright in as much upon a presentation.
And then came the virus. One of the post-pandemic world’s trends is that every office is its own coworking space. In many companies, people spend half of their time working remotely, and it means that these companies can hire more people than the number of equipped working places they have, which means working places need to be booked, which means it requires some sort of automation. OfficeRnD bit into the new clientele, and now its is its primary niche and hope for its future.
In its October’s round, the startup brought in as much as USD 10M.
#offline #saas #uk #rounda
Translation: Kostiantyn Tupikov
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
