Sequoia India bets big on co-working spaces; to invest $20 million on Awfis

There were just about a handful of co-working spaces in India when Awfis started two years ago. Now, there are about 140.

Awfis was founded by Amit Ramani, an architect with a masters in real estate and workplace strategy from Cornell University. He has been running architecture, design, and consulting services firm Nelson in India for the last nine years, and that gave him insights into the industry.
 

Awfis started in April 2015 by offering an 80-seater space in India’s capital city Delhi to small companies, entrepreneurs, and others looking for communal office space on short-term commitments. It now has 21 co-working hubs across eight Indian cities with a combined seating capacity of 7,500. In another two years, Awfis wants to up that number to 100 hubs with 35,000 seats.

The scaling up is among several reasons why Sequoia India is betting $20 million on Awfis in a series A round of capital infusion into the booming co-working spaces business.

This is the biggest funding round in the space in India, and Sequoia is going solo with it. The round is even bigger than all of the capital raised by the top 10 highest funded co-working startups in India – combined.

Awfis has inked around 100 alliances with companies like Oyo, Paytm, Mega Cabs, Hard Rock Cafe, and Amazon Web Services to provide additional value to its community members. “For example, AWS gives cloud computing credits of almost $5,000 for our community members. That makes sense for a CEO of a company. Oyo provides discounts to our community members. Paytm, Hard Rock Cafe, and others give various offers,” Amit says.

This is an excerpt from the article published on Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here

This is an excerpt from the article published on Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here