Flexible office space has been an evolving concept in motion for the past few years. It’s become so entwined with coworking in recent years that most people use the terms interchangeably. However, the modern understanding of this notion, which began as industrial space with offices and associated warehouse space, has expanded to include any short-term rented office space. While most standard office leases last anywhere from five to twenty years, flex space allows businesses to be more versatile and responsive to market changes.
As people return to the physical workplace, the pandemic has exacerbated existing patterns and prompted many organisations to seek flexible office space as a possible solution to changing expectations. Because the idea of flexible office space is continually growing, it might be difficult to define.
Meanwhile, BeerOrCoffee defines itself as a B2B marketplace for on-demand workspaces that intends to give companies with hybrid work options. On its marketplace, it lists over 1,100 shared workspaces in 160 Brazilian cities, including WeWork, Selina, and Impact Hub.
This São Paulo-based flexible office marketplace has secured $10M in a Series A round led by Kaszek. The round also included Valor Capital Group, bringing BeerOrCoffee’s total raised to around $13M since its debut in 2017. Booking.com’s creator, Kees Koolen, led the startup’s seed round in 2018.
BeerOrCoffee Products
OfficePass, the company’s main product, is a corporate benefit. It’s a payment-as-a-service (PaaS) office subscription that offers employees access to a distributed network of office spaces, with the employer only paying for the actual use of the space. According to Roberta Vasconcellos, CEO and co-founder of BeerOrCoffee, anyone can choose the closest space and book to use shared areas, meeting rooms, or private offices.
Customer iFood, for example, provides the OfficePass advantage to over 4,500 employees and uses 240 different spaces throughout 67 cities in Brazil. Itau, Banco Inter, Creditas, QuintoAndar, Stellantis, Sodexo, MRV, Mapfre, and Movile are among the startup’s other clients.
“On the one side, we better people’s work/life balance and productivity, and on the other hand, we streamline companies’ expenses and time with an as-a-service model and consolidate all of their workspace management in a single dashboard,” Vasconcellos explained.
Naturally, the pandemic aided the company’s expansion as the world’s workers became more dispersed. That demand is still there. BeerOrCoffee reported that in the third quarter of 2021, the number of bookings on its marketplace increased by 243 percent over the previous quarter. However, it refused to provide specific income data.
The firm also offers private “hubs,” or office spaces, with adjustable contracts in addition to OfficePass. It claims that the benefit to businesses is that they will not have to invest in infrastructure such as furniture, internet, or cleaning.
BeerOrCoffee claims that its staff, which consists of 82 persons, has worked in over five nations since its inception, according to Vasconcellos. While it is now focused solely on Brazil, it has plans to expand throughout Latin America in the future.
Kaszek’s managing partner and co-founder, Hernan Kazah, says his firm has been “always impressed by the high-quality network of offices BeerOrCoffee was creating and the fantastic response they were getting” from some of its portfolio companies.
