Knotel acquires 42Floors

The flexible office provider’s acquisition of commercial real estate search engine 42Floors will provide Knotel with access to data and technology on more than 10bn sq ft of office space.

This data will be used to accelerate Knotel’s plans for its own blockchain platform.

Neither company has revealed the value of the acquisition.

42Floors was founded in 2011 as a platform to provide users with a free, comprehensive database of available office spaces, complete with crucial data about the listings.

The 42Floors acquisition comes in the wake of Knotel’s procurement of the German workspace operator Ahoy!Berlin in June, as the company continues to expand its offering in Europe.

Amol Sarva, co-founder and CEO of Knotel, said: “42Floors built a powerful tool to organize a dark market that hasn’t changed in a hundred years. It’s still backroom and bilateral while the rest of the world is becoming digital and standardised. This is what leads to transactions that take months to close with a dozen middlemen – no reliable information. You can buy a house faster than you can rent a floor. Partnering together will help give owners and customers what they both want: truth.”

Founder and CEO of 42Floors, Jason Freedman, said: “Working with Knotel is a natural extension of what we came to do. We started 42Floors to upgrade an industry hopelessly out of date and make it more user-friendly. Renting an office shouldn’t be an archaeological expedition. With Knotel, we have a partner to take this to the next level with a blockchain platform, where all transactions will be recorded to the ledger in daylight.”

Since its founding in 2016, Knotel has has raised $100m in funding, and provided more than 1 million sq ft of office serving high-growth and enterprise companies across New York, San Francisco, London, and now Berlin. In New York’s Chelsea neighborhood alone, Knotel has been responsible for nearly 30% of all deal activity since January.