New Delhi: Flexible workspace aggregator Qdesk has received an investment of an undisclosed amount by JLL Spark, the Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm of real estate consultancy JLL.
This is the first investment by JLL Spark in an Indian venture, it said in a statement.
Founded in 2015 by Lavesh Bhandari and Paras Arora, Qdesq has around 2,200 centres, listing of 500,000 desks in near real-time, and covers top 35 Indian cities. It has emerged as a dominant distribution channel for co-working players like 91Springboard, WeWork, AWFIS, Regus, Smartworks, Oyo and Innov8.
“The investment in Qdesq taps into the growth opportunity that the flexible workspace segment offers,” said Ramesh Nair, CEO & Country Head – India, JLL.
Co-working model has been gaining currency in India and the share of co-working among overall office leasing has gone up to 15 percent in the January-June period of 2019 as against just 8 percent in the whole of 2018, according to a study by JLL.
“Qdesq sits at the cusp of one of the largest disruptions in commercial real estate,” said Anuj Nangpal, Asia Pacific Lead, JLL Spark.
“Qdesq is able to close even large enterprise occupancy requirements within days. Our transaction volumes have been growing over 400 percent year-on-year,” said Paras Arora, Co-founder, Qdesq.
Qdesk plans to have its operations in most of the big cities of Asia and has just launched its services in Philippines.