There are plenty of coworking spaces out there, but while the like of WeWork and TechHub focus on major capital cities, others have seen a fertile space emerge in developing economies.
Thus coworking network Talent Garden has landed a €12M funding round from investors including Endeavor Catalyst (supported by LinkedIn), 500Startups and Italy’s largest investment bank, Tamburi Investment Partners. The funds will be used to expand into Europe, with the UK and the Republic of Ireland in the coworking network’s sights. Its expansion model focuses on ‘up-and-coming’ cities in North and Eastern Europe.
Founded in Brescia – a small city in the North of Italy – Talent Garden has spread its network among a number of European cities in the last five years.
In reality that means it’s gone into a bunch of Italian cities which are cheap to operate in, as well as cities like Tirana, Albania and Bucharest, Romania.
It now has 17 coworking campuses, covering 1,500 digital professionals across five European countries (Italy, Spain, Albania, Romania and Lithuania) with new places opening in DACH area, France and more campuses in Spain.
It also runs a “TAG Innovation School” education programme which focuses on coding, UX, Ecommerce etc.
Talent Garden CEO and founder Davide Dattoli has built the network by focusing not just on tech startups but on small businesses like designers and marketing companies.
He says they focus on “tier 2 markets” so (not London and Berlin) and creatives as well as freelance and corporates.