Why Coworker Raised a 2nd Seed Round (on a $4.5 million valuation)
Why we did it
After Coworker’s original seed round became oversubscribed in 2016, and during this past year, we turned away some potential investors while we focused on product, technology and growth.
Being a lean team with low overheads, we didn’t want to raise too much external capital too early (and still don’t).
But when we met recently with a reputable investor who approached us last year, who believes strongly in our community and platform, we realized we were in a fortunate position of being able to easily raise a bit of extra cash to help us scale faster without the distraction of raising a large VC round.
So earlier this week on October 23rd 2017, we raised $500k in our second seed round on a $4.5 million valuation.
You can read the original story here on Tech In Asia.
We’ll be using this to grow our team with strategic technical hires as we focus on building new features and new integrations with workspace membership & management softwares.
With the addition of our newest investor, we now have a total of 7 amazing Angel investors that we’ve welcomed into the Coworker family. These include Jeff Natland (founder of Neteller, investor in Ring and Flexport), Jon Davidman (Yahoo and Broadcast.com alum, serial entrepreneur and veteran investor), Chinese real estate mogul Chen Chao, Rob Kall and Ben Strum.
Why only Angel investors, not VCs? Or why not raise a Series A instead of doing a second seed round?
We decided not to invite any VCs to participate or raise a Series A, mainly because we felt like pitching would be a distraction.
Fundraising can be a very time consuming process and as early stage founders it’s more important to us to focus on the product, community and our team rather than spend time pitching to VCs.
But also, we really love having awesome angel investors in our crew. Each of our investors brings decades of experience as an entrepreneur in verticals that we’ll most likely need expert advice in as we grow.
The journey so far
Since launching 2 years ago and with backing in 2016 from global investors from the US, Asia Pacific and Europe, Coworker has grown to help hundreds of thousands of people connect with their ideal coworking space. Recent users include people from Uber, Shopify, Spotify, Pfizer, Cathay Pacific, Ogilvy and Mckinsey.
When we first launched, we positioned ourselves as “Tripadvisor for coworking spaces” and have collected more than 10,000 member reviews and tips for coworking spaces around the world so far.
But we quickly realized that in this emerging multi-billion dollar industry, a review platform wasn’t enough to solve the pain point that caused us to build Coworker in the first place. Reading member reviews are great, but what’s the point if you can’t take immediate action?
So over the past few months we rolled out additional features including “tour bookings” “free day pass bookings” and “reservation requests” for hot-desks, dedicated desks and private offices.
We’ve also launched website review widgets so coworking spaces can showcase their awesome member reviews on their own websites, and launched our API to help other websites show nearby coworking spaces and member reviews.
Coworker connects people with 5500+ coworking spaces in 115 countries, and over 4000 coworking space managers around the world currently use Coworker as their official marketing platform ❤