The Boston software company teaching office buildings to compete on experience - not just square footage.
For most of its history, commercial real estate competed on two things: location and price. HqO, founded in Boston in 2018, was built on a different premise - that the modern office building is closer to a product than a piece of property, and products have to keep their users happy or lose them. Its software gives landlords a single platform to run the tenant experience, from a branded app in every occupant's pocket to the data that tells owners whether people actually want to be in the building.
The company calls the category "Real Estate Experience," or REX. In plain terms, HqO connects three things that used to live in separate silos: how a building is operated, how its tenants engage with it day to day, and the financial outcomes - renewals, retention, leasing - that follow. When a tenant orders lunch, books a conference room, reports a maintenance issue or badges through a door, that activity becomes signal. HqO turns the signal into a score owners can act on.
It is a bet that looks sharper after the pandemic reshuffled the office. With hybrid work giving employees a permanent alternative - home, anywhere - a lease stopped being a lock-in and started behaving more like a subscription. HqO's pitch to landlords is blunt: the building now has to be worth the commute, and you can't improve what you can't measure.
HqO's reach is measured less in users than in real estate. Powering 400 million square feet across more than 700 buildings puts its software inside a meaningful slice of the world's premium office stock - and inside the daily routine of hundreds of thousands of the people who work there.
HqO's REX platform stitches together a tenant app, an analytics and intelligence suite, an amenity marketplace, and building-operations tools. Landlords get a single system to run engagement, operations and the financial story that connects them.
The buyers are commercial owners and operators: Hines, Vornado, JLL, JP Morgan, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Gecina. The daily users are their tenants and employees, who experience HqO as their building's app.
Hybrid work gave people somewhere else to be. Owners were flying blind on why occupants show up - or don't. HqO makes tenant experience measurable, then ties it to retention and renewals.
Plenty of vendors ship a tenant app. HqO's differentiator is the measurement layer - acquired through Leesman, Office App and Symbiosy - that links experience to dollars, backed by one of the largest workplace datasets in the industry.
"A universal remote for office buildings."- How HqO's product has been described in the trade press
The unified system for experience-driven portfolios, connecting asset management, the tenant lifecycle and building operations so teams can set and track KPIs.
A branded building app for ordering food, booking rooms and amenities, digital keys, communications and everyday building services.
Benchmarking and analytics that measure occupant experience and satisfaction, powered in part by Leesman's workplace dataset.
A curated directory connecting landlords to 70+ amenity and service partners tenants actually want to use.
Tools that turn building visibility into engagement and leasing into lasting tenant loyalty.
Work orders, vendor discovery, compliance, contracting and billing wired into the same platform as experience.
HqO runs a B2B SaaS model - subscription software priced by portfolio, building or square footage, layered with an amenity marketplace and research/benchmarking data products. It has raised roughly $200M across multiple rounds. The chart below tracks disclosed round sizes.
The 2023 Series D was led by Koch Real Estate Investments - a Koch Industries subsidiary - with Accomplice, Insight Partners and Related participating. Notably, the capital arrived during an office-market downturn, when much of the industry was writing off the sector.
Chase Garbarino, Greg Gomer, Jared Stenquist and Kevin McCarthy launch HqO to build a tenant experience platform for commercial real estate.
A round led by Insight Partners scales the tenant experience platform across office portfolios.
HqO wins the top prize in the inaugural PropTech Breakthrough Awards.
The purchase of a European tenant and employee engagement platform pushes HqO international.
HqO adds a global leader in measuring workplace experience - and one of the industry's largest datasets.
Koch Real Estate Investments leads a round bringing total funding to roughly $200M.
A smart-office solution from HB Reavis adds IoT data as HqO positions REX to link operations, experience and financial outcomes.
The Fall 2025 release is purpose-built for "Experiential Landlords" to power the entire tenant lifecycle.
The tenant-experience corner of proptech is crowded - Equiem, VTS (which absorbed Rise Buildings and Lane), Cohesion, Spaceflow and building-operations vendors all court the same landlords. HqO's argument for standing apart is the data layer: rather than competing feature-for-feature on the app, it acquired the companies that measure workplace experience and folded their benchmarks into a platform that ties experience to renewals and leasing.
"REX aligns operations with human needs to boost financial performance."- HqO, on the thesis behind its platform
That framing - human needs on one side, financial performance on the other, data in between - is HqO's claim to a distinct seat in the market. Its acquisitions of Leesman, Office App and Symbiosy read less like feature grabs and more like an effort to own the measurement standard for how good a building actually is.
HqO was co-founded by Chase Garbarino (CEO), Greg Gomer, Jared Stenquist and Kevin McCarthy. Garbarino, a repeat founder, has become one of proptech's more visible voices on the post-COVID office. The company's edge is that blend of disciplines - commercial real estate know-how paired with software and data science - which lets it speak the landlord's language of leases and renewals while shipping the product experience tenants expect from consumer apps.
HqO makes a real estate experience (REX) software platform for commercial landlords - a tenant app, analytics/intelligence suite, amenity marketplace and building-operations tools that help owners measure and improve how people experience their buildings.
It was founded in 2018 in Boston by Chase Garbarino (CEO), Greg Gomer, Jared Stenquist and Kevin McCarthy.
Roughly $200M in total, including a $34.25M Series B in 2019 and a $50M+ Series D in 2023 led by Koch Real Estate Investments.
Commercial real estate landlords and operators - including Hines, Vornado, JLL, JP Morgan and Alexandria Real Estate Equities - plus the tenants and occupants in their buildings, spanning 400M+ square feet across 32 countries.
Rather than only offering a tenant app, HqO built an end-to-end platform tying tenant experience and building operations directly to financial outcomes, backed by a large workplace-experience dataset from its Leesman, Office App and Symbiosy acquisitions.