China's UrWork gets $45m Series C round

The investment, which also featured CK Home – Key Investment Group and venture capital firm Context Lab, values UrWork at RMB9 billion. It comes four months after the company received a $178 million pre-Series C round from strategic investors Beijing Capital Land, Beijing Aikang Group, Star Group, and Prosperity Holdings.

The new capital will go towards further upgrades in UrWork’s technology and services as well as continued global expansion. The company now has more than 100 locations across 30 cities, including Singapore, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London, as well as more than 20 Chinese urban centers. It claims to service over 3,000 enterprises and 40,000 individual members.

"The rising concept of co-working addresses the more mobile working style that modern urban professionals have today, where an increasing number of young people work on the go, resulting in an underutilization of stock assets. By revitalizing the spaces with craft architecture, designer interior and connected technology, we recapture the latent stock spaces, creating more added value," said Daqing Mao, UrWork’s founder and CEO, in a statement.

Prior to establishing the company, Mao held executive positions at real estate developers CapitaLand and China Vanke. He is also founder and CEO of 5LMeet, which is said to be China’s first co-living concept company. It was launched in partnership with Traders Hotel in Beijing. UrWork claims that China’s sharing economy is growing at 36% year-on-year and will become the largest in the world within five years.

UrWork lists Sequoia Capital, ZhenFund, Gopher Asset Management, and Sinovation Ventures among its investors. The company has also received funding from Tianhong Asset Management, a money market fund affiliate of Ant Financial, a fund launched by Shanghai Jiaotong University, and various property developers.

Earlier this year, UrWork and 5LMeet together received RMB800 million from conglomerate Beijing Xingpai Group. This followed a merger between UrWork and New Space, a rival co-working space operator that also acts as an incubator, providing funding to start-ups through the Aplus Fund.

Co-working spaces are proliferating in Asia as companies opt for more flexible real estate arrangements. For most larger operators, the challenge is competing with global behemoth WeWork, which received $4.4 billion from SoftBank Group and the SoftBank Vision Fund in August, including $1.4 billion for the development of local units in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Korea.

This followed a $500 million investment from SoftBank and Hony Capital in WeWork’s China entity. Hony first backed WeWork last year in a Series F round earmarked for Asian expansion.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Expansion
• Support services
• Real estate
• China
• Growth capital