The rise of the niche workspace is well documented. But there’s a new(ish) kid in town, who’s the polar opposite of the startup scene. And he’s muscling in on the coworking community to grab a piece of the entrepreneurial action that fills such spaces.
Say hello to the new wave of coworking corporates.
It all (properly) started in 2016, when Microsoft announced staff in Atlanta, New York, Portland and Philadelphia could work from WeWork spaces. HSBC, Salesforce.com, Facebook, Starbucks and the Bank of America are now all WeWork enterprise partners.
The number of corporate or enterprise customers (those with 1,000 or more employees) using WeWork has doubled from last year to more than 1,000 businesses and 25% of WeWork’s annual revenue now comes from such companies, according to a recent report from Recode.
The coworking corporate phenomenon isn’t unique to WeWork. As Varun Bhanot, PR and business development lead at UK flexible workspace marketplace Hubble, explained: “Here at Hubble, we’ve had a number of corporations approach us for specific coworking space – some to use as a separate department arm for their company, others to set up a specific innovation lab to work on bleeding edge products.”