It no longer surprises me that there are still legacy industries that have yet to have been fully digitised. Or that startups are still exploiting opportunities to bring further online convenience to the delivery of goods and services.
Enter Service Partner One, a Berlin-headquartered startup that is bringing the booking and management of various office management services online, via its website and/or iPad and iPad app combo. The company has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by EQT Ventures, with participation from Earlybird, Target Global, Rheingau Founders, Ringier Digital Ventures, and Vito Ventures.
Through the Service Partner One app, a range of services can be booked, including office cleaning, delivery of fruit and beverages, coffee machines, water dispensers, and office supplies. The draw being that all office management-related can be managed through a single destination, despite multiple providers behind the scenes, including the issuing of one single monthly invoice.
“We’re a curated marketplace with a SaaS solution and are building the office operating system for office managers,” is how Sven Hock, Service Partner One CEO and co-founder, explains it. “In each category we have the best handpicked suppliers for the office”.
The overall idea is to make the job of office managers easier and more efficient by providing a single point of contact, so that they don’t have to juggle different suppliers and invoices.
“They always have a complete overview of things that are being done,” he says. “And we facilitate communication with the cleaners”. This includes the ability for office managers to leave notes for suppliers via the iPad app, such as special cleaning instructions, or directly comment on the quality of their work.
Hock says the startup’s typical customers ranges from offices with as little as 10 or up to 500 employees based at a single location. This spans SMBs but also larger corporations like McKinsey&Company, and Commerzbank.
“Our clients also include Spotify, Twitter, Salesforce and WeWork, one of the world’s largest co-working companies. Customers don’t have to take all services, they can choose either a fruit-basket, drinks or of course the whole package for their office. But mostly customers start with one service and take other services on top after a while as its super convenient and we are not more expensive,” he adds .
To date, Service Partner one says it digitally manages 500 offices in six European cities. They are Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, and Cologne in Germany, and most recently London in the UK. That’s seen the startup grow its team to 70 people, and it will use today’s new capital to fuel further growth in Europe.