Qdesq acts as an aggregator for sharing vacant work desks, offices, conference rooms etc.
Qdesq Realtech Pvt Ltd, an on-demand platform for sharing and renting office space, has raised an undisclosed amount in its seed round from a group of investors led by Dheeraj Jain, partner at Redcliffe Capital, a UK-based hedge fund.
Other investors who participated in this round are Jagdish Kumar, former regional director, Asia Pacific DuPont, and angel investors Bharat Gupta, Ankush Saigal and Praveen Saini.
The company would spend the fund in team expansion, operations, technology enhancement and inventory expansion, said Paras Arora co-founder of the company.
The Gurgaon-based company was founded in October 2015 by Arora, partner at early stage investment firm Udaan Angels and an alumni of London Metropolitan University and Lavesh Bhandari, alumni of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. Bhandari has worked with companies such as Ixigo and Royal bank of Scotland before.
The start-up acts as an aggregator for sharing vacant work desks, offices, conference rooms etc. Besides aggregating third-party venues, it also plans to have venues fully managed by the company. Of the 23 venues it has on the platform, the firm manages one of them on its own. Going forward it plans to add 100 more venues in the next two months with at least two being fully managed venues.
The company offers managed and serviced office space with plug-and-play facility, power back up, air conditioning, wi-fi, tea, coffee and housekeeping. It allows businesses to rent spaces on hourly, daily and monthly basis. It also offers a virtual personal assistant, business concierge and administration support desk on demand.
“We aim to revolutionize office occupancy experience by ensuring affordability, flexibility, predictability and geographical spread so that people can work wherever you want on your terms, hassle free,” said Arora. The company claims to have sold the services to almost 35 companies so far.
According to Arora, the venues are currently being booked largely by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, consultants and freelancers. While incubators and accelerators such as 91 springboard and Investopad have always been providing co-working space for start-ups for a small fee or an equity stake in their companies, the shared working space has become quite a rage in the past few months.
The sector has seen launch of over a dozen start-ups with a few of them receiving funding as well.Qdesk is likely to compete with My Cute Office which raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round from Lead Angels last year. Other start-ups in this domain include names like Altf Coworking and Innov8.
[“source-Livemint”]
