Remote working options and workplace flexibility can be a bit of a head-scratcher for employees and employers alike, but Gable, which has just raised $12 million in Series A funding following on a $3.25 million round of seed funding, is hoping to make it smoother for everyone. The company provides a one-stop-shop for managing employees’ remote working options. Through the Gable portal, employees can search for and book a spot at a locally available workspace in 26 different countries and employers can manage payments.
There are reams of research showing how much workplace flexibility is valued by employees, but workers also recognize that it comes at a cost. Employees can feel disconnected from their colleagues and there are concerns about whether remote work is a barrier to career progression. From the employers’ side, remote recruitment gives an opportunity to build the strongest team that’s the best fit for their company, but the negatives mean that as well as wanting to maintain engagement and workforce satisfaction, they also need to manage their budgets and figure out how to extract value for money from their existing premises.
This is where Gable thinks it can help. The portal doesn’t just show which nearby workspaces in a company’s budget have available slots — it also indicates if colleagues are booked in to work there, too. Someone can then book to work adjacent to a colleague, giving them a bit of connection. According to Gable, companies using its service have seen their employees’ interest in coming into an office increase by 75%.
Gable claims that its service provides support to multiple different teams within a company, from HR and people operations to real estate and workplace teams, saving both time and money.
“Companies find it hard to provide workspaces across locations, stay on top of budgets, and have insight into how the spaces are being utilized. That’s where Gable comes in,” says Gable’s co-founder and CEO, Liza Mash Levin.
The benefits that Gable describes include vetting all of the locations that it lists to check things like Wi-Fi speed and kitchen availability. Its pay-as-you-go model is designed to give control to companies over how much they spend on flexible working places and hopefully reduce costs as well. Gable suggests that its tools can help to reduce real estate costs by giving companies an overview as to how they are spending their money on workspaces. It also aims to be a time-saver by providing integration for its centralized management suite with HRIS tools and Slack. I don’t know about you, but I’m not super-psyched about spending even more of my time on expense claims, so that seems like a pretty decent idea.
“The most challenging task for a product team is to build simple solutions that people actually want to use, so, naturally, that’s what I’m passionate about. There’s no better feeling than showing someone a demo of Gable and them being amazed by its capabilities and simplicity, says Levin.
Gable can provide workspace in cities reaching across the globe, from Buenos Aires to Yokohama; Brisbane to Vancouver. The company says over 5,000 employees are making use of Gable’s service. Gable reports that employees have enjoyed a 4x to 5x increase in productivity, collaboration, and satisfaction since switching to it, and now they want to bring this improvement in engagement to more businesses and more employees.
Gable’s $16 million investment has been co-led by SemperVirens and Foundation Capital, with participation from Tishman Speyer Ventures, Ulu Ventures and January Ventures. With this funding, Gable has two goals:
First, to expand its workforce in the sales, customer success, and marketing areas. The intention is to target larger enterprise customers, spreading Gable’s roof further.
Second, Gable wants to extend its product offering and will be hiring more engineers and product team employees in its Israel offices to facilitate this.
“We’re expanding our product offering to provide a hybrid management solution that will become a one-stop-shop for People and Workplace teams to have full visibility and control over their workforce, whether in flex space or leased spaces,” says Levin. “Another exciting thing we’re focusing on [is] deepening the insights and data we can surface based on tracking employee bookings and behavior. With this, we’ll be able to help people-leaders be more data-driven.”
For Gable, the intention is to assist companies in increasing their employees’ satisfaction and engagement while at the same time being able to effectively manage their workspace spending and reduce real estate costs.
In the long-term, Gable’s aim is to make itself as ubiquitous as Slack or Microsoft Teams and be part of every company’s essential toolkit for managing its hybrid workforce.
“The world of work is changing rapidly, and there is a growing need for creative, and powerful solutions that help companies build connected and engaged teams while supporting flexibility,” said Colin Tobias, partner at SemperVirens, one of Gable’s lead investors. “The Gable team has built a differentiated, people-focused solution and we’re excited and proud to support them in powering the workplace of today and tomorrow.”
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