DeHouse partners with Sonae Sierra to open coworking space in Porto
The Porto-based startup will open a new space in the Península Boutique Centre next October, with 260 jobs for various businesses.
The Península Boutique Centre shopping mall in Porto will come to life in October. Coworking operation and management startup DeHouse has signed a partnership with Sonae Sierra to use a space in the mall and open an office area for companies, intending to create a new local business ecosystem.
The initial outline of the project predicts a capacity for 260 jobs, Tomás Pitta, one of DeHouse's co-founders, told Jornal Económico (JE).
Founded in 2021 by Tiago Carvalho Araújo and Tomás Pitta, DeHouse has three coworking spaces in Porto and two in Braga. It houses around 800 clients, 95% of which are companies, including firms such as Volkswagen Digital Solutions, Visma, Siemens, Web Summit, consultants PwC and NTT Data, and startups such as Exclusible, Chainlink, Lympid, Realfevr and Utrust.
"The typical coworking space has digital nomads and then rooms with X number of seats. With us it's the opposite, because we have a suggestive layout, we find the clients and adapt the space. Let's imagine that the company says it wants to close off a section, have two more offices, etc. We study the company's DNA and do the whole project, because we have the background of the furniture company,” explains Tomás Pitta, referring to Caos, also founded and led by Tiago Carvalho Araújo.
In Tomás Pitta's opinion, companies are giving their employees flexibility with hybrid working arrangements, but they are increasingly valuing a return to the office. "So that people can be with each other, teams can get to know each other... We even believe that, in the future, offices will be social spaces rather than work spaces. People work from home, but they have to get to know each other and have connections,” he says.
DeHouse has a more ambitious strategy: "to be an operator rather than a coworking space”. The aim is to start expanding into other regions of Portugal and resort to offices of companies that don't use them because of the remote working model. "A lot of companies have had to invest in offices and have many employees working from home. In other words, at the moment, offices are a source of expenses for companies. Our idea is to find these spaces, put our brand on them, make the space profitable, and give the revenue share to the owner,” Tomás Pitta told Jornal Económico.
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