Coworking Space Giant WeWork Enters Indonesian Market with Spacemob Acquisition

The world's largest company by sector co-working space, WeWork, paved the way to enter the Indonesian market by acquiring Spacemob, a startup co-working space based in Singapore. Spacemob, founded by Turochas 'T' Fuad, is opening soon the coworking space in Jakarta. The Spacemob team, consisting of 20 people, was absorbed into WeWork Southeast Asia and Fuad became its Managing Director. It didn't say how much this acquisition would cost, but it said WeWork would invest $500 million (more than 6,6 trillion Rupiah) to develop markets in Southeast Asia and South Korea.

Spacemob shows its uniqueness as a company co-working space because they don't just sell place services, they also develop a computerized system to make it easy for tenant-his. The company has complete technical, from full-stack developer, front-end engineer, designer, to product manager.

Especially for Fuad, this acquisition is exitits the second in the last 4 years. In 2013, his travel startup, Travelmob, was acquired by HomeAway, which is still part of the travel giant Expedia.

WeWork is currently said to be valued at $20 billion (more than IDR 260 trillion). Initially they focused on the United States market and have now expanded to Europe and China. Asia is naturally the next attractive market to target.

To DailySocial, in previous interview, Fuad said that Spacemob was founded based on his understanding of the partnership between hotel managers and property owners when managing Travelmob. From there he saw an opportunity to bring a model like this to the industry coworking. Spacemob was born with the premise that space is the “second most important thing”. The main thing is the support and ecosystem provided to members.

Spacemob has secured initial funding of IDR 74 billion at the end of 2016 to develop markets, including Indonesia, from a number of investors. One of the investors is Alpha JWC.

In Indonesia itself, the market co-working space just started and not yet a segment profitable. Most co-working space currently still in the stage of building the ecosystem.

In early August, the Salim Group and NUS Enterprise brought co-working spaceBlock71 to Jakarta. Block71 previously had a presence in Singapore and San Francisco.

Even though most consumers co-working space are startups and freelancers, they started targeting corporations as potential consumers.

“Our goal is to help these companies move to a new space in a matter of weeks or days, without the need to invest large sums and take long to fill offices. We're not just here to sell space. We are here to build an inclusive community of startups, freelancers, and medium and large sized companies," said Spacemob's Head of Marketing Daren Goh in a previous interview.