Sequoia-backed Awfis looks to open 100 centres in the next 24 months, but must manage growth without becoming overly reliant on start-ups, says AlnoorPeermohamed The co-working space market might double within two years FACT BOX
As Amit Ramani was reimagining what the workplace of the future would look like for large corporate clients in the US, he began noticing some of his clients moving their employees out of satellite offices and into shared workspaces.
While he didn’t see the shift as a threat to his own business Nelson, he did see an opportunity. If even large corporates were unwilling to pay hefty rents in cities such as New York, certainly large corporates in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai must feel the same way.
Being so up close and personal with this massive change between 2008 and 2014 in the US, Ramani decided that replicating a similar model in India could pay hefty rewards. In April 2015 he founded Awfis, a start-up that would offer shared office space to individuals and companies in India. The beginning Ramani says some part of the success Awfis has seen so far is because he was able to spot the trend of co-working quite early on in the US. While certainly not the first player to enter the Indian market, the timing couldn’t have been better — in 2015, both start-ups and Associate director at research and consulting firm RedSeer Consulting SMEs saw a massive surge thanks to both an influx of foreign funding and a push from the government.
“I think it was a very interesting time in the evolution of work itself. Co-working The adoption of co-working spaces is still at a nascent stage and it is rapidly increasing within multiple customer segments - freelancers, startups, SMEs, professional services, etc. This makes is too early to predict the sector’s potential. For all we know, the current market might double within the next two years.
Awfis stands out for its ‘ambience’ and ‘ease of doing business’. For the tenant Inception Area of business Co-workingspaces Funding
from The Three Sisters: Institutional Office;
from Sequoia India spaces are actually addressing some key problems — a start-up doesn’t have money, corporates have money but don’t want to spend on real estate and SMEs have realised that they need to be presentable,” said Ramani, founder and CEO of Awfis.
Unlike many of its competitors, Awfis did not go after just start-ups to fill seats at its centres. Instead it turned to SMEs and large corporates, giving it steady growth and a stable base of customers. From the beginning, Awfis was incubated out of The Three Sisters: Institutional Office (TTS:IO), the family office of YES Bank founder and organisations at the growth stage, considering ad hoc requests and being flexible with lease plans/ work-space layouts/ amenities etc. serve as strong delight factors. Awfis tops that up with a friendly staff.
As the time lag for start-ups between setting up and funding is more in India (as compared to the global scenario), these co-working spaces will be perceived as supporting sustainability. As more of these co-working spaces offer flexible and affordable plans, a lot of movement will happen from start-ups currently using cafes in pursuit of better networking opportunities and ease of hiring employees.
Another trend that we might observe will be longer association of tenants and adoption by bigger firms. With improved customer service, the benefit of hassle-free operations and low turnaround time for setting up teams in new geographies will emerge as strong value propositions.