JLL Spark, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm of JLL, has invested an undisclosed sum in Indian flex-space technology platform, Qdesq. This marks the fund’s first India-focused investment.

With this, Qdesq intends to invest in the analytics capabilities of its technology platform, the company said in a statement.

“Companies are no longer interested in inefficient leases with long lock-ins. Businesses are increasingly looking for the flexibility to easily expand or contract their footprint. With its comprehensive inventory of real-time availability of managed spaces, Qdesq can dramatically reduce the lead-time to occupancy for companies,” said Anuj Nangpal, Asia Pacific Lead, JLL Spark.

Founded in 2015 by Paras Arora and Lavesh Bhandari, Qdesq is a digital platform that allows companies to transact flexible workspaces, managed workplaces, virtual offices and individual offices. It currently transacts one desk every 20 minutes on behalf of corporates.

At present, Qdesq has about 2,200 centres, lists over 500,000 desks in near real-time, covering the top 35 Indian cities and has as a distribution channel for co-working operators such as WeWork, 91Springboard, AWFIS, Regus, Smartworks, Innov8 and Oyo.

According to a JLL study, the share of co-working office leasing has risen to 15 per cent in the first six months (January-June) of 2019 from the 8 per cent level seen in 2018. The segment has absorbed 10.1 million square feet of cumulative space since 2017 to the first half of 2019, according to the findings.

NA Shah Associates and Fortitude Law were advisors to the transaction.

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