Realty business organisation Embassy Group who is also a joint venture partner in WeWork India, has injected around $15.6 million into the company. In return for its investment, Embassy Group will get 100,00,000 compulsory convertible debentures.
WeWork India is a joint venture between the luxury property developer Embassy Group and the New-York headquartered WeW0rk which was founded in 2010 by Miguel McKelvey, Adam Neumann. It is currently valued at over $20 billion.
In July 2017, WeWork, which is considered as the world’s largest co-working startup, opened a centre in Banglore, which they called ‘WeWork Galaxy’. Later, in September 2017, it opened two more centres in the country, one in Banglore and one in Mumbai. Collectively, WeWork is present in three cities across the country. In Delhi NCR, it has set up one workstation. Mumbai and Banglore have three and four centres respectively.
The newly acquired funding will be used by the company to increase the number of office spaces across Banglore, Mumbai and Delhi.
Jitendra Mohandas Virwani, chairman and managing director of Embassy Group, and Karan Virwani are the designated partners of the investing firm Embassy Buildcon. The proceedings of WeWork India are managed by Karan Virwani. PR Ramakrishnan, Embassy Group’s chief financial officer; Christian Lee, managing director, WeWork Asia; and Karan Virwani manage the company’s important affairs and constitute the board of directors.
In August 2017, WeWork raised a colossal amount of $4.4 billion from the SoftBank Group and its Vision Fund.
WeWork not only supports startups but also offers its shared workspaces to large organizations who want to set up small teams in corporate environments. WeWork handles over 275 offices in 59 popular cities across the world.
The concept of co-working has recently flourished to a great extent. In November 2017, Nimit Mahajan of Nimitaya Group launched GoWork which has two campuses spread over 4.5 lakh square feet and 3.5 lakh square feet located 100 metres apart in Gurgaon. The company claims that it can house over 12,000 people.
Other successful companies that offer coworking spaces to startups and corpora are 91 Springboard, 9JCM, Bangalore Alpha Lab, CoWork Cafe and Innov8 to name a few.