WeWork is one of the biggest names when it comes to shared office spaces – a phenomenon that has been slowly disrupting the way start-ups rent workspaces and grow. By the end of 2018, WeWork already had more than 4,00,000 paying members worldwide that used its flexible or shared space. In fact, 43% of its total revenue came from workspaces that were located outside the US.
With its huge surge in international growth, the company saw its sales increase to 1.82 Billion USD. However, at the same time, its losses also doubled to 1.93 Billion USD. While WeWork is still a private organization, it does occasionally share some of its financial metrics with the media, even though it is not required to. More often than not, at times most of its announcements of financials along with other, bigger announcements. WeWork has raised funds from SoftBank, which is one of its biggest investors. The company saw an influx of 1 Billion USD in convertible notes, and 3 Billion USD warrant from the investor.
Image Credit -WeWork
Softbank’s investments in WeWork
SoftBank has been consistently investing in WeWork. It invested 2 Billion USD in the company in January. With this deal, WeWork was then valued at 47 Billion USD. However, as large as this investment may sound, it was actually much smaller than the one that SoftBank had originally planned to make. The Japanese conglomerate had initially discussed the possibility of an investment of $16 Billion but then changed its mind.
However, this smaller investment was still viewed as a big accomplishment by the team at WeWork. Mr. Artie Minson, the President of the company, said “If someone had said to me back in August, ‘Look, you’re going to raise $6 billion … and you’re going to raise it at the valuation we raised at, we would have all said that was a huge home run,” He further elaborated on this by saying “I continue to believe that transaction was a huge home run.”
