United, we start-up

The city which thrives on start-ups is witnessing a paradigm shift in how they function. These start-up spaces are not your typical dreary office confines.

Leveraging on the idea of how your environment shapes who you are, these young, cool and hip start-up hubs are the way to go for many entrepreneurs working out of one location, to not just optimise their resources, but also collaborate with one another, and work whenever and however they want.

Bengaluru is mushrooming with many such workspaces like Workshaala Spaces, Axilor, Bangalore Alpha lab, Bangalore co-working hub, Cobalt BLR, Cowork Café, CoWork India, Evoma, IKeva, Jaaga, BHive, Smart spaces and others, where over a 100 start-up spaces function under one roof.

The concept well-known worldwide was started by Brad Neuberg who created the first ever co-working space and defined it as “a workspace that combines the freedom of working for yourself with the community and creativity of a traditional job,” and it is now finding its way into our city. We find out more on how this trend works in Bengaluru.

After working in the IT industry and running his own IT consulting firm, Manoj Khandelwal faced immense space challenges and decided to set up Workshaala Spaces at six locations in the city.

“There are 150 national and international start-ups that have worked under Workshaala. It’s not just a space that they get, but also complete start-up solutions with a team of 20 experts. Besides providing the right infrastructure, we also host events, intra company businesses, team building activities and talks from industry leaders. You will find an entire gamut of the start-up world on one floor from consulting to cloud to communication with companies like Next G Com, Cohere-med in health care, Button making in fashion, Luxury scape, a travel portal and many more,” shares Manoj.

Varun Kabra, product and business head, CrewKarma, a professional network for the otherwise fragmented creative industry that provides one-stop solutions for creative and design requirements states, “I like working out of such start-up spaces as they provide access to a pre-vetted and top quality pool of creative professionals, and at the same time guarantees quality deliverable within strict timelines. It also saves one of the largest fixed costs for any start-up, which is the excruciating office cost, as one doesn’t need to worry about the day-to-day running issues.”

Paving the way for this shared working space concept is Axilor, another start-up space with Ganapathy Venugopal as CEO. Founded by some of the most respected entrepreneurs, like SD Shibulal, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Tarun Khanna, Srinath Batni, Ravi Gururaj, Sanjay Anandaram, Mekin Maheshwari, Vijaya Kumar and others, it provides space for many start-ups in various fields. Aashit Verma, a young IIITH alumni alongwith Ateendra Singh, Sachin Kumar and Prashant Kashyap founded Storewalk to connect shoppers, a mobile shopping app. Aashit who functions out of Axilor in JP Nagar says, “These spaces help start ups like ours to function efficiently while saving huge costs. These are also great places for networking for small businesses and enterprises.”