Tech For Coworking: How Croissant Has Evolved From App To Community Builder

Published on June 8, 2017 - By Adam Greenwald

Earlier this week, we heard from Raaly and the new service they’ve launched for coworking technology. Today, Nisha Garigarn, co-founder of Croissant, shares what the pioneer coworking app is up to and their plans for the future. 

Croissant is a space-as-a-service coworking app that has seen significant growth over the last year, both in the demand side (users) and the ‘supply’ side (coworking operators).

What started as an initial seed investment of approximately $125K from the San Francisco startup incubator 500startups, Croissant is now a 2 year-old company with several thousand curated users that span several large markets including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington D,C.

In its early days, the app was created by a common concern shared among its 4 co-founders. At the time, it was extremely difficult to find an affordable way to work together in New York City. Not long after encountering this issue, Croissant was officially born.

Today, their mission is to find ways to make it easy and affordable to find a place to work; especially for the growing independent and remote workforce.

“We found that there was no simple way to find workspace in the city, so we took the best parts of the coffee shop and the best parts of an office to create Croissant,” the founders explain on their site.

Being named the “Uber of rentable desk space” by the New York Times, co-founder Nisha Garigarn has seen her app pivot from being purely a technology platform that links available desks in coworking spaces to workers who need to rent them on-demand. With the already built-in matching technology, the founders have shifted and expanded their offerings to “really focus on community,” Garigarn explained. “We built out some new features of which one is to be able to see events in coworking spaces,” she added.

The focus on building a true community of members has typically been the job of a physical coworking space owner or operator. But now with coworking spaces popping up around the world virtually every week, the founders of Croissant are hoping to assist the members on the ground with the added technology embedded in their app.

“We started to do coworking sessions in some of our New York locations so that our members and members of the coworking spaces are able to meet each other and start a conversation,” Garigarn explained. This is the first step in “getting a greater user experience while experimenting in building a strong coworking community,” she added.

As for what is in store for Croissant going forward, the founders continue to take things day by day. Although they are working with a hotel in San Francisco to help turn their lobby into a functional coworking space, the team seems committed to their original vision of making their platform “inspiring” for both their rapidly growing user base and the “traditional” coworking spaces that want to partner with Croissant.

The platform basically policies itself now, with users crowdsourcing data back to the app so that any changes can be made quickly and efficiently.

“People are changing and the way we work is changing–so staying flexible is important. We see Croissant going global one day,” she declared.