Searching for office space in New York is notoriously tough, but Y Combinator-backed 42Floors is hoping to make it easier for local businesses.
The office space search engine on Friday announced an expansion to New York and a $ 5 million Series A round of funding from 35 big-name investors, including Thrive Capital’s Jared Kushner, Founder Collective’s Chris Dixon, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and Digital Sky Technologies’ Yuri Milner. The company said the majority of its investors are New York-based because that’s where it plan to focus.
42Floors, which launched in San Francisco in March, provides users with a free, comprehensive database of available office space listings, along with photos and relevant information. The goal of the site is to make the usually painful and frustrating search for office space hassle-free. The search engine serves businesses of all sizes, but 42Floors’ “growth hacker” Darren Nix told me 80 percent of its queries are for spaces between 1,000 and 6,000 square feet, making its “sweet spot” companies with 5 to 50 people.
For now, the comp;any targets the businesses themselves, but Nix said they believe brokers will find it valuable in the future.
“Our plan is to reinvent office search one city at a time. We had huge demand in San Francisco,” said cofounder Jason Freedman in a statement. “So, for the New York launch we’ve quadrupled our capacity by partnering with the biggest property owners and brokers beforehand.”
In September, the company revealed in a job listing on Hacker News that it had raised $ 5 million but didn’t reveal its funders.
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