In conversation with spaceOS founder Marley Fabisiewicz

PlaceTech gets the lowdown on the office management software’s rise.

Who are spaceOS?

spaceOS is a leading proptech scaleup, providing technology for commercial real estate, flex space operators and corporate clients since 2016. It was developed in New York´s buzzing New Lab space in 2016 by founder and serial entrepreneur Marley Fabisiewicz. Co-founders Maciej Markowski, ex-CBRE, JLL, and Cushman & Wakefield, and Danish Abdullah, who worked as a technology executive for the likes of Rocket Internet, joined the company in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Dirk Bernhardt, a senior finance manager who combines corporate and startup experience joined the executive team as CFO in 2020.

What do you do?

Our mission is to provide a scalable operating system for flexible, safe and human-centric workspaces. Our tools provide better data, greater control, more adaptability for office landlords, and better user experience for their occupiers.

Talk us through recent big news

We have just announced a new capital raise totalling €3m. The latest funding comes from Austrian commercial real estate group Immofinanz who took a €2m stake in spaceOS, further strengthening our partnership following a deal in December to roll-out the spaceOS platform across the group’s entire portfolio. Existing investors BeyondBuild  and Rsquare also contributed an additional €500,000 each to this funding round.

With Hitachi we are announcing an exciting partnership, in which Hitachi has integrated its IoT platform with spaceOS in order to equip properties that have integrated building and IoT technologies by Hitachi. These can now incorporate the spaceOS UX and functionalities into their tech stack. It’s a truly exciting way for us to enter the Japanese market with such a strong and experienced partner.

What’s the problem you address?

The non-digitisation of commercial real estate assets, the lack of good user experience in workspaces and the non-existing connection between landlord and occupier.

How do you solve it?

We ultimately digitise physical assets, in particular office buildings, and turn them into connected workspaces that offer choice, flexibility, services and a community for occupiers through our platform. In the background we provide APIs to integrate existing building technologies like access control and other soft- and hardware into one holistic tech-stack for commercial real estate. We also improve the landlord’s understanding of their occupiers’ sentiment and intent, based on collected and analysed data, thus enabling landlords and operators to understand and retain their tenants.

What are the benefits?

• Improved tenant retention through understanding of the occupier
• Increased asset value by offering flexible, safe and human-centric workspaces
• Great user experience through on-demand services, amenities and programming for the employees (talent) of occupiers
• Greater efficiency by fully digitizing operational processes like end-to-end occupier lifecycle management, including offers, contracts and payments for leases and memberships
• The creation of new revenue streams by creating hyper-local-marketplaces and offering services
• A centralised data pool that can be exchanged and harmonized with other building technologies
• Ability to turn any property into a flex space with end to-end processes

What’s the future of offices?

The future of offices looks great, if we all commit to making them places that we enjoy. We need to foster interactions, collaboration and learning at the workspace and design them accordingly. Giving occupiers the choice when and where they work, combined with a seamless user experience, is another essential feature of the office and workspace of the future. Lastly and essentially, we need to make offices more sustainable and enforce energy saving and more thoughtful ways of utilising the resources.

Who do you admire?

Focusing on the proptech segment, I’d say it’s companies like Edge and FifthWall and MetaProp that are really driving change and paving the way for a more sustainable real estate industry. Generally I’d say Stripe, they have made complex and heavy regulated processes in finance easily applicable to today’s technology. I believe that something similar is possible in real estate, hence the reason we are putting a lot of emphasis on our open API approach.

Favourite tech

Apple AirPods, Slack, Zoom and Figma