Sit&Plug grows from Barcelona to make finding and managing the office easier

Finding an office, for a company, is not simple. There are many variables that must be taken into account, also in a city like Barcelona, and in a work environment increasingly marked by the need for flexibility and, at the same time, the ability to attract the team to the office. In 2019, even before the pandemic, coworking spaces and flexible offices had already begun to gain weight, but the offer was dispersed, and companies had difficulties knowing what was available and what options fit their needs.

Given this dispersion, Sit&Plug emerged to make this offer visible and bring it closer to companies. The project was born from the hand of three partners: Jaume Iglesias, Ricardo Muñoz, and Ferran Ramírez, who shared experience in digital companies, from Trivago —where Iglesias and Ramírez met in Germany— to Accenture.

“We saw that there were two ways of understanding the office: companies that invested in it and those that didn't,” explains Iglesias, now CEO of Sit&Plug. The first step was to build a map of the office ecosystem and create a simple entry point for companies. Coworking had grown strongly, but the offer was still difficult to compare, and Sit&Plug wanted to turn that dispersion into a platform where a company could easily find the space it needed.

In a first phase, they focused mainly on freelancers, but they soon iterated: “We started with freelancers, but we saw that it was not our market,” Iglesias recalls. The focus shifted towards small and medium-sized companies, especially those with up to 250 workers who need an office without wanting to assume all the complexity involved in setting it up and managing it.

The start, however, was marked by covid. Sit&Plug was born at the end of 2019 and, a few months later, the world of offices stopped: “Who was going to look for an office at that time?”. The pandemic forced them to review the technology and rethink the model while digitizing internal processes. The market began to recover from 2022, and in 2023 they took a new leap: Sit&Plug stopped being just a coworking marketplace to become a workspace services company.

With this change, Sit&Plug went from facilitating the office search process to also being able to design, reform, and put it into operation, as well as taking charge of the day-to-day management once the company is established. “The idea is that you only need to go with your computer, and you can already work,” summarizes Iglesias, and that office management does not represent a problem for the company.

This evolution has generated an acceleration of the business. Between Barcelona and Madrid, Sit&Plug currently closes about 150 operations per year, with more than 60% of this business in Barcelona and its surroundings. The company has a team of nine people, and has built what Sit&Plug is with its own funds. “We have always done it based on our business, being profitable from day 1 and reinvesting,” explains the CEO. This way of growing has allowed them to adjust their proposal to customer demands, with a business model that currently generates more than 9 million euros annually in operational value, while the startup's turnover exceeds one million euros.

After starting operations in Madrid in 2024 and launching a physical presence about a year ago in the city, the next step for the company is to expand the map. The plan is to enter two or three more Spanish cities, with Valencia and Malaga among the options, before looking towards Europe. Lisbon could be one of the first entry points, followed by other markets such as France, Germany, or the United Kingdom.

Regardless of the city where it operates, the companies that Sit&Plug targets usually share certain characteristics: they are companies that work in changing environments, such as fast-growing startups, international companies, or newly created businesses.

Whatever their sector, they all have one common need: they are looking for an office that contributes to attracting talent and building a certain work experience, without having to become real estate experts and without the office becoming a headache. Sit&Plug precisely aspires to this: that the company can forget about what needs to be managed for the office to function, and at the same time be attractive to its team.