Bulgarian proptech startup OfficeRnD has successfully closed a $10M funding round to accelerate growth and market share expansion. Lead investor is US-based Runa Capital, with previous backers Flashpoint Venture Capital and LAUNCHub Ventures joining again. This news follows as OfficeRnD has hit several key milestones: passing the 1000 customers mark and helping deliver “work from anywhere” experience to tens of thousands of tenants and more than 300 000 employees. As of the moment, the company has raised over $14M in total.
“Technology has been on a steady path of enabling flexible work for over a decade and COVID has only served to accelerate the process. OfficeRnD has been a thought leader in defining and enabling flexible work models that help companies maximize the yield of their real estate while driving up people’s engagement. Our platform allows landlords, flex workspace operators, and companies to engage people and manage their workplace on a flexible-first principle”, says Miroslav Miroslavov, Co-founder and CEO at OfficeRnD.
Miroslavov shares for The Recursive that the investment will mainly be used for the expansion of the Bulgarian team with specialists from all domains, and especially from the product management field. With the expansion of the team, OfficeRnD will aim to open new offices across multiple cities in Bulgaria such as Sofia, Plovdiv, and Varna. The main focus of the team will be to fuel the development of its recently launched OfficeRnD Hybrid product which allows corporate businesses to provide their employees with a more flexible and hybrid-office model of work.
With an almost entirely Bulgarian team of around 100 local and only 15 international employees, Miroslavov highlights that unlike other tech companies, OfficeRnD will continue to keep its core leadership and development teams in Bulgaria. Alongside the expansion of the Bulgarian team, OfficeRnD will also hire more people in its offices in London, Australia, and the US, where the Atlanta-based team would double or triple its size.
When it comes to the lessons that Miroslavov learned from his experience as a local founder who develops a global product, he shared: “The leadership team is the most important element for the success of a startup. The fact that we have managed to build a strong local leadership team, allowed us to scale our business in parallel to closing a fundraising round.”
OfficeRnD in the fast-growing hybrid office market
OfficeRnD started in the coworking niche back in 2015 but has since evolved to serve the entire flex space segment that has been exploding in the past couple of years.
According to Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index , 73% of employees are expressing a desire for flexible work options after the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same 66% of businesses have been thinking about a redesign of their physical spaces in order to better accommodate hybrid work environments. Businesses like Google, Twitter, and Adobe have publicly committed to a flexible workplace model. A CNBC survey of top executives in human resources, finance and technology indicated that 45% of companies will use a hybrid work model in the second half of 2021.
“OfficeRnD has become extremely relevant for the industry that is largely shifting to a hybrid work model having tested it during the pandemic. A lot of companies we know have grown yet kept the same lease on their office and now realize they want to use it differently and provide more opportunities to their employees, says Dmitry Chikhachev, General Partner at Runa Capital.
At the moment, OfficeRnD’s has customers in 90+ countries all over the world with the US accounting for 45% of the platform’s clients, followed by 15% in the UK, the EU and APAC.
