Naked Hub emerges as WeWork’s main competitor in Asia

Hours after WeWork announced plans to move into Japan, one of the U.S. co-working giant’s chief rivals made a move to increase the competition in Asia.

Naked Hub, which was born out of China-based luxury resort company Naked Group, today announced a merger deal with JustCo, a fast-expanding co-working firm located in Singapore.

It also revealed that it is working to finalize a $200 million Series C round before the end of next month. That’s in partnership with power-broker China Renaissance, which backed Uber rival Didi among major Chinese tech firms, and it could value the firm at $1 billion, SCMP reported. Naked Hub closed a $33 million Series B led by real estate PE firm Gaw Capital last year, until then it had been self-funded by its parent firm.

Those figures may be a drop in the ocean for WeWork — which pulled in a massive investment of $760 million this month at a valuation of $30 billion — but they represent significant progress for a venture that is just two years old, and only expanded outside of Shanghai at the beginning of 2017.

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