Mark Dixon turned a plain observation - real business happening at cafe tables - into Regus, the flexible-office network that now spans thousands of locations and quietly outlasted the startup that was supposed to bury it.
Owl Labs is a Boston-based company that builds AI-powered, 360-degree video conferencing devices for hybrid organizations. Its flagship Meeting Owl line is an all-in-one camera, microphone, and speaker that automatically pans and zooms to whoever is talking, aiming to give remote participants an equal seat at the table. Combined with its Owl Intelligence System software and its widely cited annual State of Hybrid Work report, Owl Labs positions itself at the intersection of meeting-room hardware and the broader conversation about how distributed teams work.
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform built for remote and hybrid teams. Instead of screen-sharing and tab-juggling, it put video and live, editable web apps - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello and more - side by side in persistent virtual rooms, so a team could return to a project exactly where it left off. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, the company raised roughly $38 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Icon Ventures, Spark Capital and HubSpot Ventures, and held five patents. In late 2024 Ashkenazi wound down Switchboard and pivoted the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform.
Frank Weishaupt is the CEO of Owl Labs, the Boston company behind the Meeting Owl, a 360-degree video conferencing device built for hybrid meetings. He joined in 2018 after two decades in sales and operations leadership at CarGurus, Criteo, Jumptap and Yahoo, and has since made Owl Labs a widely cited voice on the future of work through its annual State of Hybrid Work Report.
Density is a San Francisco-based people-analytics company that builds privacy-first sensors and software to measure how offices, buildings, and other spaces are actually used in real time. Founded in 2014 by Andrew Farah, it pairs radar and depth-sensing hardware with its Atlas analytics platform to help enterprises cut real estate costs, plan hybrid workplaces, and understand utilization without cameras or personally identifiable data. Backed by more than $225 million in funding and a $1.05 billion valuation, Density serves Fortune 500 customers across dozens of countries.
DTEN is a San Jose-based hardware company that builds all-in-one video conferencing and collaboration devices for hybrid workplaces, schools, and healthcare. Founded in 2015 by Wei Liu and closely tied to Zoom, DTEN pioneered the all-in-one touchscreen meeting appliance with its D5 and D7 lines and today ships AI-enhanced systems certified for both Zoom Rooms and Microsoft Teams Rooms, combining 4K cameras, microphone arrays, touch whiteboarding, and cloud device management in a plug-and-play package.
Codi is a San Francisco startup rethinking the office for hybrid work. It began by offering private, fully serviced, turnkey offices on short leases - a flexible alternative to WeWork-style co-working and traditional multi-year commercial leases - and has since expanded into an AI-powered platform that automates office management tasks like cleaning, pantry restocking, and vendor coordination. Founded in 2018 by Christelle Rohaut and Dave Schuman, Codi has raised roughly $23 million, including a $16 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Kadence is a workplace operations ("WorkOps") software platform that helps enterprises coordinate people, time and space across hybrid and distributed teams. Born from the pandemic-era pivot of wireless-charging startup Chargifi, the San Francisco- and London-based company unifies desk and room booking, visitor management, team scheduling, occupancy analytics and AI-powered coordination into one platform. Kadence is used by more than 10,000 teams across 40+ countries, including Boeing, Ashurst and BDO, and raised a $20M Series A in 2025 led by High Alpha.
Robin is a Boston-based workplace management platform that helps companies run hybrid offices - booking desks and meeting rooms, mapping floor plans, managing visitors, and measuring how space actually gets used. Founded in 2014 by brothers Sam and Zach Dunn with Brian Muse, Robin now serves thousands of organizations worldwide, including HubSpot, Peloton, Riot Games and UNICEF, and has layered AI agents on top of the office to automate the busywork of getting people and rooms in the same place.
Micah Remley is the CEO of Robin, a Boston-based workplace platform for hybrid offices - meeting room booking, desk hoteling, wayfinding, and space analytics. He took the top job in January 2022 after selling MineralTree to Global Payments, and previously helped scale energy-management software company EnerNOC from startup to Nasdaq. He is a Yale SOM MBA, a University of Maine ecology grad, and a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Richard Scannell is the CEO of Lambent (formerly Armored Things), a Boston-based SaaS company that turns Wi-Fi signals and building sensors into anonymous occupancy analytics for corporate and university campuses. He took over in July 2022 as the company pivoted from securing sports venues to helping facilities managers argue with executives about whether Tuesday is really the new Monday. Before Lambent he co-founded Glasshouse Technologies, which grew to more than $100 million in revenue, and led RiverMeadow Software and Login VSI's North American operations.
SoWork is a generative-AI-enhanced virtual office platform that gives distributed teams a persistent, customizable workspace where avatars work side by side, spatial audio recreates hallway serendipity, and AI quietly captures meeting notes and action items. Founded at Harvard by three co-founders and legally incorporated as Sophya, Inc., the company raised a $15M seed round led by Talis Capital in 2021 and counts teams from startups to large enterprises among its users - with a stated mission to move workplaces from the earth to the cloud.
Oscar Mattsson is the founder and CEO of allwhere, a New York startup that handles the unglamorous physics of remote work: buying, shipping, tracking, and retrieving the laptops and gear that distributed teams scatter across the globe. A founding member of WeWork's enterprise business, he launched allwhere out of D.E. Shaw's venture studio in 2021 and brought it out of stealth in July 2022 with $9.5 million in seed funding. His bet is simple and stubborn - flexibility is permanent, and someone has to manage the hardware behind it.
Omnissa is an independent digital work platform company spun out of VMware's End-User Computing business after KKR's roughly $4 billion acquisition closed on July 1, 2024. Led by CEO Shankar Iyer, it builds the autonomous workspace: a unified platform spanning Workspace ONE (unified endpoint management), Omnissa Horizon (virtual desktops and apps / DaaS), and Omnissa Intelligence (analytics and digital employee experience), increasingly stitched together with trusted, AI-driven automation. The company serves more than 26,000 customers worldwide, including a majority of the Fortune 500, with about $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue and roughly 4,000 employees.
Mio is an Austin, Texas company that makes enterprise chat platforms talk to each other. Instead of forcing a whole organization onto a single tool, Mio sits in the middle and federates the public APIs of Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat, Zoom Team Chat and Cisco Webex so a message typed in one app lands natively in another. Founded in 2015 by Tom Hadfield and James Cundle and backed by Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Zoom and Cisco, Mio turns the messy reality of multi-platform companies (and the partners they work with) into a single, interoperable conversation.
Nerdio builds software that automates and simplifies the deployment, management, and cost optimization of Microsoft cloud technologies - Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft 365, and Intune. Born as an internal tool at a Chicago managed service provider, Nerdio spun out in 2020 and now serves over 23,000 customers worldwide through two flagship products: Nerdio Manager for Enterprise and Nerdio Manager for MSP. In March 2025 it raised $500 million from General Atlantic at a $1 billion+ valuation.
Venn is a New York cybersecurity company that secures remote and hybrid work on personal, unmanaged, or contractor-owned computers. Its patented Blue Border technology installs a lightweight agent that creates a company-controlled Secure Enclave on any Windows or Mac machine - work apps run locally inside a literal blue border where data is encrypted and isolated from personal use, with no virtual desktop, no remote session, and no shipped laptop required.
Webex is the collaboration platform born from one of the web's first conferencing companies and now run by Cisco. It bundles meetings, calling, messaging, webinars, contact center, and a line of conference-room hardware into a single suite, layered with AI for transcription, real-time translation across dozens of languages, and agent assistance. It serves enterprises, governments, schools, and hospitals that need secure, large-scale communication for distributed teams.

Dawn Klinghoffer is Vice President of HR Business Insights at Microsoft, where she leads people analytics for one of the world's largest technology companies. A mathematics major from Bucknell University who started as an actuary in Hartford, Connecticut, she joined Microsoft's fledgling people analytics team in 2003 and spent over 25 years turning HR data into strategic decisions. Her most recognized contribution: replacing the industry's standard 'employee engagement' metric with 'employee thriving' - a framework adopted by Microsoft in 2022 that has influenced HR practices globally and was published in Harvard Business Review.
Envoy is a workplace platform that helps over 16,000 organizations run smarter offices - from front-desk visitor sign-in and package deliveries to desk booking, meeting rooms, and workplace analytics. Founded in 2013 in San Francisco by ex-Twitter engineer Larry Gadea, Envoy became a unicorn in 2022 after a $111M Series C.
Dan Ryan is the CEO and Co-Founder of VergeSense, the leading occupancy intelligence platform transforming how global enterprises manage their real estate. A serial entrepreneur with a track record in hardware-software integration, Ryan previously co-founded ByteLight (LED-based indoor positioning, acquired by Acuity Brands in 2015) before launching VergeSense in 2017 through Y Combinator. Under his leadership, VergeSense has grown to serve 200+ Fortune 500 companies across 140 million square feet in 50+ countries, raising $82.6 million including a $60M Series C in 2021. Ryan is based in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area and is recognized as a pioneer at the intersection of physical and digital worlds, building AI-powered tools that help companies make data-driven decisions about office space, sustainability, and hybrid work strategy.
Larry Gadea is the founder and CEO of Envoy, the San Francisco-based workplace platform that turned the humble office sign-in book into a $1.4 billion unicorn. A Romanian refugee who was recruited by Google at 17, created Twitter's 'Murder' infrastructure tool as one of its first 50 employees, and spotted a market gap nobody else noticed: enterprise software had completely ignored the physical office. From smuggled out of communist Romania to building the software that runs 14,000+ workplaces in 70 countries, Gadea's story is one of relentless pattern recognition, resilience, and the stubborn conviction that the office deserves the same engineering love as everything else in tech.
VergeSense is a Mountain View-based occupancy intelligence company that uses AI-powered sensors and a cloud analytics platform to help enterprises understand how their offices and buildings are actually used. Founded in 2017 by Dan Ryan and Kelby Green, it serves over 200 enterprise customers across 50+ countries and monitors more than 140 million square feet of space.
Workspot is a cloud-native platform that delivers Windows and Linux desktops, apps, and GPU workstations as a service across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Built for enterprises moving away from legacy VDI, it lets IT teams provision a global cloud PC fleet in days rather than months.
Andrew Farah is the CEO and co-founder of Density, a San Francisco-based company that builds anonymous, privacy-first sensors to measure how physical spaces are actually used. What started in 2014 as a fix for a coffee shop line problem in upstate New York has grown into a $1B+ enterprise used by Fortune 500 companies across 1.25 billion square feet globally. Farah has raised over $217 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, and Altimeter Capital, and has built Density into what he calls 'Google Analytics for the built world.'

Sean Kae is the Chief Executive Officer of Modo Labs, the Boston-based no-code platform that powers mobile campus and workplace apps for universities, hospitals, and enterprises. He joined as COO and was elevated to CEO in August 2022 to lead the company's next stage of growth, drawing on 16+ years at Samsung and time as an executive-in-residence at Storm Ventures.

Wei Liu is the founder and CEO of DTEN Inc., a San Jose-based company he started in 2015 that has become a recognized leader in video conferencing hardware and collaboration technology. Drawing on his earlier experience scaling multi-touch hardware at PQ Labs, Liu built DTEN from a single 65-inch touchscreen device into a full portfolio of AI-powered, plug-and-play collaboration systems deployed across enterprise, education, and healthcare environments globally. DTEN's close partnership with Zoom - which made a strategic investment in the company in 2021 - and its expanding support for Microsoft Teams Rooms and other platforms reflects Liu's belief that seamless, equitable collaboration should be available to every participant, in every room.