WeWork acquires coworking space company Spacious

WeWork, a global coworking space aggregator giant, isn't planning on slowing down its industry expansion

The We Company announced that they will acquire on-demand workspace company Spacious—a rival that transforms empty space in restaurants during the day into co-working spaces. The acquisition, while relatively small (Spacious has raised around $9 million in private funding) would add to WeWork's ever-growing number of acquisitions. WeWork declined to comment on the price of the acquisition.

"WeWork is still in growth mode—they need to hit those growth numbers post-IPO, and a couple acquisitions would help them do that," says Matthew Kennedy, Senior IPO Market Strategist at Renaissance Capital, a provider of institutional research and IPO ETFs. "It’s clear that WeWork is trying to expand beyond its traditional office space model. Spacious attempts to utilize underutilized properties as office space, like restaurants, and [WeWork] has a demonstrated ability to create premium work stations, so it does seem like a logical fit.”

While the terms of the acquisition are undisclosed, Spacious, which uses a membership model and is based in New York City, is just one of many co-working companies to be consolidated. In fact, even back in 2017, The Information reported WeWork's Chief Growth Officer David Fano affirmed the company's strategy to “buy, build, [and] partner" on a greater scale. And they've certainly stuck to the plan.

Acquire and conquer

WeWork has long been on an acquisition spree, snapping up companies like Chinese co-working company Naked Hub in 2018, Singapore-based Spacemob in 2017, and even somewhat off-brand acquisitions like digital marketing company Conductor in 2018 and social group organizer Meetup in 2017. And so far this year, WeWork has only ramped up their spree with data platform Euclid as their first 2019 acquisition, mobile access platform Waltz in June, and real estate management platform SpaceIQ in July (to name a few).

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