Riding the wave of ever growing demand for plug and play, affordable real-estate space in India, Awfis, a co-working space provider with over 30K seats across India, has scored $30 million in a fresh round of funding. Existing investors, Sequoia India and The Three Sisters Institutional Office also participated in the current round, the company said.
At present, Awfis has 30,000 seats across 63 centres in 9 cities with a member base of over 1,500 companies and 25,000 professionals. With more capital in place, the company will now look to expand both capacity and its functional geographies.
India has become a hotbed for coworking spaces, as the country continues to see a boom in number of startups coming up across the subcontinent. In terms of a number of startups — a rather vague term that has been used by the Government quite often — India says it stands on the second spot, behind the US. And with that ever-growing number of startups there has been an immediate need for affordable plug and play office infrastructure.
Talking about the fund raising round, Awfis founder and CEO Amit Ramani said, “The additional capital raised will support us in expanding our footprint in India with more than 400 centres and 2,00,000 seats over the next 36 months. Our focus is to fortify our base in Tier I cities and further enter newer market with expansion into Tier II cities.”
And while startups are generally associated with coworking spaces, there has been a trend observed lately in established companies as well, with these companies moving into plug and play infrastructure, instead of owning office real-estate.
In terms of local players, Awfis and 91Springboard are the ones that have a pan-India presence. Oyo, the over $10 Billion valued hospitality upstart, too recently entered the co-working domain with massive offerings. Those came on the heels of the company acquiring Innov8 co-working — a network of co-working spaces, placed mostly in posh pockets of urban India.
