By Mathias Flattin & Eloïse ColasThe company Bright Spaces is raising a seed round of €1.5M led by Axeleo Capital to pursue its expansion in Europe and open an office in the UK where the company already has customers.We are pleased to invest alongside PiLabs (after Propster one month ago - https://www.axeleo.com/propster-proptech/), Business Angels from tier one real estate companies and historical investor Sparking Capital.Why do we strongly believe in Bright Spaces? Based in Romania, Bright Spaces provides an end-to-end digital leasing solution for commercial spaces worldwide.Launched by serial entrepreneurs Bogdan-Adrian Nicoara and Andrei Constantin, the company started at a hackathon in 2019, where Real Estate professionals encouraged Bogdan and Andrei to participate and get involved in the very young Proptech ecosystem.Bright Spaces solution helps tracking leads, sending offers, managing informations about the assets and the demand of the future tenants. It is also a tool to optimize floor plans with 3D visualization, check availability, and find points of interest both inside and outside the building.For brokers it is a way to market the assets, and for owners, the platform helps leasing departments to save 25% of their time usually spent on manual tasks, allowing them to focus on customer relationships.Accelerated by the pandemic, the demand for offices has changed deeply in only 18 months. Asset owners need to become more agile and adapt their assets to a more volatile demand. They face a deep change with an increase of the turnover, a need for more customized offices, a fragmentation of the tenants, requiring more efficiency in commercial and property management workflow. The capacity for commercial landlords to manage their relationship with tenants through digital means has become vital.Bucharest is a great place to launch such a project. The third largest city of eastern Europe (same size as Vienna), is home for very digitalized real estate players. In Romania, the buildings built under the Soviet Union were not designed for today’s work life which paved the way for a new generation of the real estate players after the end of Ceaușescu era. For example, the most active developer of commercial real estate was created in 2006, very recently. These companies are digital by design, since their creation, and the mindset of their founders is oriented towards scalability and efficiency, without any legacy to be transformed or modernized.Bucharest has become a strong IT cluster with most of the digital leaders opening offices there. Tech teams are highly skilled and some successful companies have already hit the headlines such as FintechOS, and the first Romanian unicorn UIPath.Several players from Eastern Europe have experienced Bright Spaces value proposition and are now starting to deploy the platform on a larger scale.Eighteen months after its incorporation, Bright Spaces platform is already operating in 14 buildings and 5M square feet, with a low touch & recurring revenue model. Most of all, it already shows a great traction with first pilots expanding to multiple assets deployment.Now launching in the UK ! With upselling customers in Eastern Europe it is time for Bright Spaces to expand in Western Europe. The company already has customers in the UK and will open an office there by the end of 2021.By bringing together Axeleo Capital (Paris), PiLabs (London), Sparking Capital (Bucharest) and fourteen business angels from international brokers, developers and asset managers, Bright Spaces shows that digitalization of leasing process for commercial real estate is a necessary step for European players to answer the post covid era.We are happy to work with this amazing team and wish them the best success.