229 West 43rd Street and Amol Sarva (Credit: Jon Ortner) When Knotel inked a lease in December at Columbia Property Trust’s 229 West 43rd Street, the flexible office space company planned to immediately sublease its full floor to other businesses. Those plans have changed, and now Knotel will be taking the entire 57,000-square-foot space for itself to serve as its new headquarters. Knotel will soon move out of its 14,000 square foot space at 137 Varick Street, which is being transformed into a campus for the Walt Disney Company in Hudson Square. It wasn’t immediately clear what Knotel was paying in rent at 229 West 43rd Street, which is formerly known as the New York Times Building. Michael Coons, Knotel’s director of workplace, said that the company had almost doubled its workforce to 240 employees since it moved into the Varick Street location in August. “This building always had a limited lifespan on it, so that was part of it,” Coons said. “And we are only part of a 14,000 square foot space.” Knotel, founded in 2016 by Amol Sarva and Edward Shenderovich, counts a portfolio of about 2.5 million square feet across 110 spaces. The firm, backed by Newmark Knight Frank, the Sapir Organization and others, has raised $160 million in funding at a valuation in April 2018 of $500 million. In the last two months, it’s signed at least 160,000 square feet in lease deals in Manhattan and is in negotiations to lease the entire Flatiron Building. Still, it has a ways to go to catch up to industry leader WeWork, which is Manhattan’s largest office tenant with over 5 million square feet. Sarva told Commercial Observer in November that within 15 months his company would be bigger than WeWork. In October, The Real Deal published Knotel’s internal numbers, which showed that the firm racked up an EBITDA loss of $24.1 million on revenues of $17.6 million between January and July.
Knotel is moving its HQ into the former Knotel building in Manhattan . The ambitious co-workspace start-up signed a lease on the property in last August , intending to sublease the entire 240 sq ft space, but has since changed its plans. Jon Ortner is moving out of its existing 14,000 sq ft HQ located at 137 Varick Street , home to a workforce of 51,000 that has double since it moved into the property last August .