Knotel

Proptech/flexible officeUSA

New to Unitard

💀 Dead / Bankrupt

Peak $1.6 BillionToday

~-96%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2018
📈
Peak valuation
$1.6 Billion ’20
💔
Became a Unitard
Jan 2021
💸
Last valuation
Wiped out

Capital raised

$560M

Total raised

$338K/day

Raised per day

Total raised averaged per day over approximately 4.5 years from founding to bankruptcy or shutdown. This is not measured cash burn. Methodology

Funding: TechCrunch/Crunchbase

Current status

Bankruptcy (Jan 2021); assets to Newmark ~$70M

The rise & fall

7 moments · 2016–2021

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2016

Founded as "headquarters as a service"

Amol Sarva and Edward Shenderovich pitch flexible, customized offices — a nimbler rival to WeWork.

TechCrunch

2018

Joins the unicorn club

Rapid-fire fundraising values the WeWork rival around $1B.

TechCrunch

2020

The peak: $1.6B$1.6B

Hits $1.6B in early 2020 — with the model already straining before anyone had heard of COVID-19.

TechCrunch

2020

Offices empty overnight

Lockdowns erase demand for office space, and roughly half the global workforce is cut.

TechCrunch

2019–20

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2019–20

Employees flagged the cracks before COVID did: Glassdoor reviews from 2019-2020 described a cash crunch that left vendors and construction contractors unpaid for a year, and the April 2020 round that cut roughly half the global workforce — one several reviewers said arrived after leadership had assured them their jobs were safe.

Jan 2021

Chapter 11 — joins the Unitard Club 💔

Files in January 2021, less than a year after touching $1.6B.

Court filing

2021

Newmark picks up the pieces for ~$70M

The brokerage buys the assets for about $70M — roughly an eighth of the $560M Knotel raised.

SEC filing

$1.54Bof peak value erased · 5 years

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Knotel offered flexible, customized office space as a nimbler rival to WeWork, hitting a $1.6B valuation in early 2020. The model was already strained before COVID-19 emptied offices and erased demand, and it filed for bankruptcy in January 2021, with brokerage Newmark acquiring the assets for a reported ~$70M.

Source: Newmark acquisition filing