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BOSTON—After raising $34.25 million in Series B financing, Chase Garbarino, CEO of tenant experience platform HqO, is geared up for growth.
HqO will use this capital to expand its technology, double its engineering team and grow sales and business operations to accelerate national and international expansion. In recent months, the company has opened offices in New York City, London and Paris to fuel its continued growth.
"We're going to continue to invest in our platform and we're going to look into market expansion," Garbarino says. "We'll be opening up offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle. We have some folks already in Texas and we are going to increase our team in London and Paris. So, we'll look to continue to expand the team from a geographic perspective."
Garbarino is also on the lookout for acquisition opportunities, specifically proptech companies that he thinks can complement his platform. "There are a lot of good small companies in proptech," he says. "Some companies are good at selling and some companies are good at producing technology. We've seen a couple of companies that have developed some interesting technology, but haven't had a lot of success going to market. So, we'll look at a couple of those and see if they can shorten our roadmap."
HqO, which has raised a total of $53 million of venture capital funding, is one of a number of firms in the growing tenant experience category. The company's platform powers 70 million square feet of office space.
HqO's technology is designed to unify all of a building's tenant facing technology, amenities, and conveniences into a single platform. It provides tenants their digital access credentials; onsite and local food and wellness options; shared conference room and service booking; and real-time tracking of shuttle services and public transportation.
"We have a number of e-commerce features that allow an office landlord to be able to drive spending to retailers in their building and in their neighborhood," Garbarino says.
The platform also features content and events help to build a sense of community throughout the property.
"We provide a very flexible platform for a landlord to have one interface for the people in their building to control all the different elements of the building," Garbarino says. "Building occupants are not going to download 30 different apps to do 30 different things."
An added benefit, Garbarino says, is that his platform gives commercial landlords (he plans to move into multifamily next year) data, which can help them to increase tenant retention, differentiate the building to prospective tenants and inform asset strategy.
"It's really important that the landlord own the interface with the consumer so that they can start to make data driven decisions with regards to how they run their assets," Garbarino says.
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Leslie Shaver
Les Shaver has been covering commercial and residential real estate for almost 20 years. His work has appeared in Multifamily Executive, Builder, units, Arlington Magazine in addition to GlobeSt.com and Real Estate Forum.
