Could The Future Of Co-working Be Less WeWork and More Freedom? – Forbes

New York, New York, USA - March 28, 2019: The Wework location on 40th street near 6th Avenue.

Think of coworking just now and youll likely think of WeWorkit doesnt feel possible to get through a day without an article on the company, their model and their impending IPO clogging up one of your social newsfeeds.

But what if the future of coworking is less about working from a single location and more about easy access to multiple co-working spaces, no matter the town, city or country you end up in? Or whether or not there is a WeWork or The Office Group in town!

Its this future that newly launched Desana is working towards. Theyre on a mission to enable freelancers and business travelers to experience a huge variety of unique spaces with a single membership.

Their newly launched U.K.-focused subscription-driven app is designed to give freelancers and digital nomads easy access to coworking spaces no matter the city they find themselves in or the type of space they want to work in.Whilst WeWork and The Office Group already offer this service for their members it is limited only to their own office spaces whereas Desana gives access to a wide range of spaces that arent normally easy to access if youre only looking to work for a couple of hours. Perfect for those times when you end up in cities and towns that dont have a WeWork or The Office Group building, for example, Glasgow or currently Edinburgh.

Whilst coworking has been around for a long time, you could even claim Regus was a coworking company, the explosion in spaces doesnt seem to be slowing down. In London its now claimed that a new coworking space opens every 5 daysso its no shock there are now businesses making aggregation platforms like Desana.

The leader in the space is Croissant who have built up a network of hundreds of locations in 32 cities but seems to be focusing primarily on major cities. Another approach is that ofWorkclubwho allow bars and restaurants to turn their spaces into coworking locations during downtime.

Their initial launch across the U.K. has been backed by Scottish VC firm, Techstart with a 550,000 seed round that was announced a couple of weeks ago and is sizeable for a Scottish early-stage company.

On the launch of the new service Michael Cockburn, cofounder of Desana, said, The idea for Desana came from our own experience of working from home - like many flexible workers my co-founder and I realized while working from our kitchen tables that we missed the camaraderie of an office space and in so doing we spotted the wider corporate opportunity. In the last decade, huge technological advancements mean that a notable portion of the global population only require a laptop and WiFi to work, Desana gives these workers the flexibility to work from a coworking office space as and when they want to - no matter where they find themselves.

With nearly 30 sites already signed up, the company has quickly been able to grow coverage across major U.K. cities throughout Scotland and England for their coworking community.

As consumers have become more used to subscription-driven models it doesnt feel like a huge jump to subscribe to your office through an app and be able to access spaces across the country as and when you need them. This, for someone who spends 50% of his time on the road is a very appealing prospect.

With any aggregation business model, the success of Desana will come down to how well they attract sites to their platform and entice workers to opt for them over a more traditional set space coworking membership.

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Could The Future Of Co-working Be Less WeWork and More Freedom? - Forbes