virtual-office
(7)
Regus
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.
GoWork
GoWork is Indonesia's largest network of premium coworking and flexible office spaces, offering hot desks, dedicated desks, private offices, virtual offices, meeting rooms and event venues across malls and office towers in Jakarta, Tangerang, Bali, Surabaya and Medan. Founded in 2016 as Rework and formed through a 2018 merger with the original GoWork, the company serves freelancers, startups, SMEs and enterprises with a mix of physical space, a booking app and business-support services such as company incorporation and mail handling.
Switchboard
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.
SoWork
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.
Vishal Punwani
Vishal Punwani is the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, a generative-AI virtual workplace platform born at Harvard's Innovation Labs. A medical doctor turned founder, he traded clinical medicine and a stint at the World Health Organization for the question of how distributed teams keep a culture alive when nobody shares a hallway. He and his two co-founders, who first met playing World of Warcraft as teenagers, set out to borrow what video games solved decades ago - presence, spontaneity, belonging - and bring it to remote work. In October 2021 the company raised a $15M seed round led by Talis Capital, counting Tinder among its early customers.
Samuel Smith
Samuel 'Sam' Smith is the CEO of Gather, the spatial virtual-office platform for distributed teams. He joined in mid-2022 as a data scientist after falling for the product on an office visit, rose to Head of Data and Business Analytics, and was named CEO in April 2026 when founders Phillip Wang, Mohammed Kumail Jaffer and Jinen Kamdar handed over the reins. A Denver-based data person turned chief executive, he is steering an independent, non-venture-backed Gather back to its roots: spontaneous conversations, customizable rooms, pets, and the small delightful details that make remote work feel less remote.
Gather
Gather is a virtual workspace where remote teams can see each other, walk up for spontaneous conversations, and collaborate without scheduling a meeting for everything. Often described as 'Minecraft meets Zoom,' it pairs a customizable 2-D world with spatial audio and video, plus AI meeting notes and async chat. Founded in 2020 and backed by Sequoia and Index, Gather has been used by millions of people for work, conferences, weddings and gatherings.