CommonGrounds raises $100M for expanding office spaces

Investors seem to love coworking spaces because billions of dollars have already been donated to the operators of such spaces and it doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon.

One such purveyor of flexible office spaces is San Diego's CommonGrounds, servicing entrepreneurs and small business in California and Colorado. Recently, the company announced that it has successfully closed a Series A financing round with $100 million which it plans to use to expand its portfolio of almost 50 sites during the next two years.

The company says the new money comes from three investors: CommonGrounds’s seed-stage backer, a local real estate investment firm; an Emirati real estate magnate; and the family office of the founders of Davidson & Associates, a now-defunct educational software company.

CommonGrounds is headquartered in the San Diego community of Carlsbad, a North County suburb. It opened its first-ever flexible office space in 2016 in Bluwater Crossing, a luxury live-work apartment complex designed by San Diego-based real estate investment firm Pacifica Enterprises. Pacifica provided the company with its seed funding, and participated in its Series A financing, according to CommonGrounds. (The company has not filed any confirmatory documents with regulators.)

Its other backers are Mohamed Alabbar, founder and chairman of Emaar Properties, the Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based real estate company that developed Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and the Davidson Group, the organization that manages investments and philanthropy for Bob and Jan Davidson. The couple sold Davidson & Associates, the software company they founded in 1996—known for its best-selling online games for students, such as Math Blaster—and left the merged company about a year later.

Fueled by the fresh cash, CommonGrounds is laying plans to open more than 40 new sites by the end of 2020. That includes more in California, and new locations in Texas, Oregon, Utah, and Minnesota.

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