BeerOrCoffee, a São Paulo-based flexible office marketplace, has raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Kaszek.
Valor Capital Group also participated in the round, which brings BeerOrCoffee’s total raised to about $13 million since its 2017 inception. Kees Koolen, the founder of Booking.com, led the startup’s seed round in 2018.
BeerOrCoffee describes itself as a B2B marketplace of workspaces on demand that aims to provide hybrid work solutions for companies. It offers over 1,100 shared workspaces in 160 Brazilian cities on its marketplace, including WeWork, Selina and Impact Hub
The company’s flagship offering, OfficePass, works as a corporate benefit. It is an office subscription that gives employees access to a distributed network of office spaces, where the employer only pays for the actual use of the space through a payment as a service (PaaS) model. People can choose the closest space and book to use shared spaces, meeting rooms or private offices, according to Roberta Vasconcellos, CEO and co-founder of BeerOrCoffee.
For example, customer iFood offers the OfficePass benefit to its more than 4,500 employees and uses a total of 240 different spaces across 67 cities throughout Brazil. Among the startup’s other clients are Itaú, Banco Inter, Creditas, QuintoAndar, Stellantis, Sodexo, MRV, Mapfre and Movile.
“On one hand we improve people’s work/life balance and productivity and on the other, we optimize companies’ costs and time with an as a service model and centralize all their workspace management in a single dashboard,” she told TechCrunch.
The pandemic, naturally, fueled the company’s growth as the world saw an increasingly distributed workforce.
“We had a great leap in demand for our service,” Vasconcellos said. “We’re helping companies make the best use of workspaces and giving their employees the flexibility to work however they want.”
That demand continues. In the third quarter of 2021, BeerOrCoffee said it saw the number of bookings made on its marketplace grow 243% compared to the previous quarter. It declined to reveal hard revenue figures, though.
In addition to OfficePass, the startup also offers private “hubs,” or office spaces, with flexible terms. The benefit to companies, it says, is that they don’t need to invest in infrastructure such as furniture, internet and cleaning.
BeerOrCoffee practices what it preaches. Its team (currently made up of 82 people) has operated in over five countries since day one, noted Vasconcellos. While it is currently focused on Brazil only, it eventually plans to expand across Latin America.
Hernan Kazah, managing partner and co-founder of Kaszek, says his firm has “always been very impressed by the high-quality network of offices BeerOrCoffee was building and the great feedback they were getting” from some of its portfolio companies.
The pandemic convinced the firm that the trend towards a more flexible working model was here to stay so Kaszek reached out to Vasconcellos with interest in investing.
It’s important to point out that BeerOrCoffee does not operate as a direct opponent with similar offerings such as coworking networks, noted Kazah.
“The co-working networks are partners and BeerOrCoffee is an asset light company,” he said. “As a marketplace, it does not own or directly operate its supply, but rather offer the product and technology necessary for its clients to find and manage their workspace and real estate solutions. This also allows them to bring new demand to the workspaces, providing a better and the cheapest channel of customer acquisition for them and allowing them to add value in their offering by being plugged into BeerOrCoffee’s network.”
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