AlleyNYC, a co-working space founded 2012, has raised $16 million in funding led by Vandewater Capital Holdings, with participation from Entrepreneur Media.
AlleyNYC was started by Jason Saltzman and Nsi Obotetukudo who wanted to create more than a room full of desks. They wanted to create a community, where entrepreneurs were constantly bringing value to each other.
They have since grown the Alley to nearly 200 members with over 50 early stage companies calling the co-working space their home. With the new financing, AlleyNYC is expanding to a second space in Chelsea with 40,000 square feet. The current space, in Midtown Manhattan, has around 16,000 square feet.
“The additional capital and the space in Chelsea, we will scale the number of companies at the Alley to more than 110 with around 600 to 800 members,” said Saltzman.
Saltzman calls this expansion ‘Alley 2.0’, wherein he envisions a number of added services that will come with an Alley membership. For example, the Alley may soon offer concierge services, accounting, legal, back-end design, and/or health insurance.
And the community extends far beyond the folks who work at AlleyNYC. The startup has a newsletter with a following of more than 250k people, as well as various events that are open to the greater tech community.
“We want our entrepreneurs to be able to focus on their companies and their products, not all the tedious stuff that comes along with building a startup,” said Saltzman. “We should be taking care of that for them, not just offering desks and coffee.”
AlleyNYC has a number of competitors, including WeWork, which has raised a total of $362 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.
You can learn more about the Alley here.