• SpotUs is a Romanian proptech that helps landlords and their tenants manage booking- and access-related issues
• It is a B2B SaaS that specializes in commercial real estate and comes in the form of an app
• In view of the ease of deployment, the company’s plans include expansion to neighboring countries

SpotUs is a Romanian proptech B2B SaaS that helps commercial real estate landlords and major tenants to manage their tenants. The founders have developed a self-service app for booking, alongside a variety of access- and security-related features.

Helping to Manage Workspace During COVID

About 7 years back, Ovidiu Ciurte assembled a team that worked on an ML startup. During their work, they began to encounter various issues with booking and managing their workspace, which became particularly acute in 2020, during the COVID pandemic. Thus, they observed a very specific need in the commercial real estate market. With its strength coming from its previous long-term collaboration and from its diverse commercial and technical expertise, the team took the opportunity and developed a parallel proptech project.

In a nutshell, SpotUs is an app developed for office developers to help their tenants better manage and book their resources. The examples of the features available for tenants include:

• booking a desk (if they work in a flexible format);
• booking a parking spot;
• getting access in the building (a virtual card replacing plastic badges);
• managing visitor flows (give their guests access into the building by sending them a QR code);
• sharing resources to optimize their costs (such as vacant parking spots during weekends). 

‘SpotUs made a lot of sense in the context of the pandemic. An important feature our solution introduced was touch-free access. Using the app, employees could enter the parking lot, the building and take the elevator to their designated floor only with their phone,’ Mr Ciurte comments.

Ease of Implementation and Scaling

He assures that the implementation process is very simple and fast and takes up no longer than a few days. For this, the team doesn’t need to be in the location – so SpotUs can be implemented for any building, anywhere in the world. Collaborating with the buildings’ teams and with their help, SpotUs can integrate the solution with the access control and all the relevant legacy systems.

Vertical-wise, SpotUs is aware of the opportunities of scale across verticals but prefers to stick to the unaddressed market in the commercial sector. For now, the team is developing and adding new features for office developers and their tenants.

Additional Data as an Added Perk

For developers, this app is also a great tool to digitalise interaction with tenants, to understand how the space is being used and take the right measures, to eliminate manual work for reception and security staff and more.

‘The beauty of SpotUs is also that it gives access to a lot of data related to how a space is being utilized. For example, a tenant understanding the occupancy degree for their parking spots can decide to share those spaces with another tenant, through SpotUs, thus cutting important costs. Developers or landlords can analyze high-traffic hours and surface usage and develop new sustainability practices, in order to optimize the resources their space consumes,’ Mr Ciurte explains.

The startup currently works with 9 buildings in Romania with +15000 people using the app. The company is poised to grow outside Romania’s national borders as Mr Ciurte’s team is looking at several countries in CEE, such as Bulgaria, Serbia or Hungary. The goal to scale in Europe, supported by potential clients, investors or even other startups that offer a complementary solution that could benefit from SpotUs’ solution.