Your Corporate Bohemian Days Are Over: LiquidSpace Raises $3.6M
We first heard about LiquidSpace during SxSW, when they debuted their mobile app, a tool that helps anyone find a place to get some work done. They’ve now raised $3.6 million in their first round of funding, led by Shasta Ventures, with returning participation from FloodGate. The app, which matches on-the-go professionals with free and rentable work spaces, is still in beta, but is steadily expanding beyond its springtime proof-of-concept, spreading to the city of San Francisco.
The funding will go towards a national expansion, finding as many cities as it can to develop its market (expect a full-service app launch in Q2 2011). “LiquidSpace is uniquely positioned to offer the growing number of mobile workers access to a variety of public and private workspaces,” said Mark Gilbreath, Co-Founder and CEO of LiquidSpace.
“Shasta is an ideal investment partner for us because of their ability to help us capitalize on future growth and strategic opportunities. Tod and his team understand this opportunity intimately, they have lived its ins and outs, and they have the relationships we need to accelerate our rollout.”
Shasta’s concern and interest in underutilized consumer markets gets an interesting take on real estate, as LiquidSpace is developing its market around this widening niche. With works spaces evolving around employee mobility, and the continued emphasis on efficiency, the concept of monetizing the office must address this new era. From hotels to cafes, property owners gain new market opportunities on a hyper-local level. Mobile workers, on the other hand, get an on-demand service that meets their needs.
The search and filter aspects of LiquidSpace is something that caught my attention when I first checked out the app, with consumer-centric capabilities that help you quickly drill down on the type of space you need, rather than throw a list of search results at you. Learning how you work is a big focus for LiquidSpace as they apply this funding to their national expansion, improving the app’s ability to make appropriate recommendations. “We’re talking about work productivity,” Gilbreath says. “We can help you be more productive.”
The OpenTable ideal, now applied to work spaces, translates into big opportunities for data collection and analysis, learning how people work, how they collaborate, and how usable real estate is adapted. As with many businesses looking towards data analysis to improve their practices, a property owner can make smarter decisions around how they allocate their space. LiquidSpace is building a management tool along side its marketplace, matching people to places with pragmatic intent.
As someone who’s worked defiantly from home even before tablets came along, it’s nice to see the days of corporate Bohemia, as Gilbreath puts it, coming to an end. LiquidSpace is a pioneer in its own right, delivering an idea to the mainstream and focusing on a very real aspect of our changing environment.
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