A fast-moving flexible office company, and WeWork competitor, Knotel is acquiring 42Floors, a commercial real estate search engine, for an unspecified price. The move is part of Knotel's plan to launch a blockchain-based listing platform.
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The acquisition would enable the company to bring new properties onto its platform and let non-blockchain-based contracts move to blockchain, TechCrunch reports.
“[The deal is to get] access to data and technology on over 10B SF of office space, driving further liquidity to Knotel’s marketplace, while also accelerating its plans for a blockchain platform,” Knotel co-founder Amol Sarva told Tech Crunch.
Knotel calls its platform KnotelKoin. Sarva recently told Bisnow that one of blockchain’s benefits is that it offers a transparent and reliable way to share data through its decentralized ledger.
KnotelKoin is designed to capitalize on the technology to remove “information opacity” and “low-value-add intermediaries” from real estate transactions, according to a Knotel white paper.
In April, the company scored $70M in a Series B funding round, and lately it has been inking a number of new leases in New York, such as at 6 West 48th St. near Rockefeller Center and East 29th Street.
In June, Knotel acquired Ahoy!Berlin, a workspace operator in Berlin. That deal followed Knotel's first expansion in Europe, in London at the beginning of 2018. The company now has around 1M SF in Manhattan alone, along with locations in San Francisco, London and Berlin.
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