Smarten Spaces

Founded in Singapore in 2017, Smarten Spaces makes software for a deceptively simple question: where do people sit, and how often? Its platform - marketed first as Jumpree and more recently as SpaceOnAI - lets an enterprise book desks and meeting rooms on interactive 3D floor maps, forecast how many people will show up next week, roster teams across a hybrid schedule, and analyze how a building is really used rather than how it was designed to be used.

The company sits squarely in proptech, the slice of software aimed at property and the workplace. But where many rivals lead with dashboards, Smarten Spaces leans on plumbing: AI models, IoT occupancy sensors and big-data pipelines stitched into one system that spans enterprise offices, commercial real estate, coworking and coliving operators, Global Capability Centers and university campuses.

Its founder is not a first-time entrepreneur. Dinesh Malkani spent years in senior enterprise roles - president of Cisco India & SAARC, where he grew the business past a billion dollars, plus president posts at Avaya in China and South Korea - before turning to an unglamorous problem most executives ignored until a pandemic forced their hand.

That timing mattered. When COVID-19 emptied offices in 2020, Smarten Spaces shipped WorkSafe, a module for safe, seat-managed returns. The crisis passed; the category it created did not. WorkSafe grew into a full hybrid workplace suite, and by 2021 both Gartner and IDC had flagged the company as an innovator in the same year.

At its core, the platform answers three operational questions in real time: how much space do we have, how much will we need, and how do we get people into it smoothly. Employees book any space from a 3D map; managers roster their teams; administrators track occupancy; and executives get analytics that feed directly into leasing and portfolio decisions.

The customer list skews large. Smarten Spaces reports more than 20 Fortune 500 companies among its clients, with deployments across 100+ cities in 30+ countries and millions of workspaces transformed. Its buyers cluster into a few clear groups - big enterprises rationalizing hybrid work, commercial landlords engaging tenants, coworking and coliving operators, and the Global Capability Centers that multinationals run in hubs like Bangalore.

The problems it solves are concrete: leases signed for floors that sit half-empty, meeting rooms that can't be found, hybrid schedules that collapse into guesswork, and a data vacuum where facilities teams should have numbers. By instrumenting the office and forecasting demand, the company lets employers right-size real estate rather than pay for space they no longer use.

What sets it apart is less any single feature than the breadth of the stack - booking, wayfinding, rostering, IoT sensing and analytics in one system, with more than 80 out-of-the-box integrations - and a decision to meet users where they already work rather than in yet another app.

Smarten Spaces runs a B2B enterprise-SaaS model: subscription licensing of its cloud-native platform, sold directly and through partners such as Microsoft and NTT, with optional IoT sensor deployments and integration services layered on top. A third-party estimate puts annual revenue near US$4M against a team of roughly 79 people spread across Singapore, New York, Bangalore, Sydney and Melbourne.

In the broader market it competes with workplace-experience and space-management players - names like Envoy, Robin, Eptura (Condeco), OfficeSpace and Density. Its edge is the combined AI-plus-IoT stack and the Teams-native distribution, which lowers the adoption barrier inside Microsoft-heavy enterprises.

The company's depth shows in its leadership. Founder and CEO Dinesh Malkani brings two decades of enterprise-scale operating experience from Cisco and Avaya. Co-founder Anushka Verghese leads product and marketing as Chief Product and Chief Marketing Officer, while co-founder Prithvi Shergill heads talent enablement and workplace design - a nod to the human side of how offices actually get used.

That mix - enterprise sales discipline paired with product and workplace-design thinking - maps to the company's positioning as a serious vendor for large, complex organizations rather than a lightweight desk-booking app. Its recognition by Gartner and IDC, and its status as a leading ISV in the Microsoft for Startups Scale Up program, reinforce that enterprise credibility.