Chase Garbarino

Even before COVID-19, office landlords were fixated on finding the right mix of tenant amenities to consistently lure companies to their buildings. Among the most successful proptech startups to gain landlords’ confidence in this amenity realm is HqO, headed by Chase Garbarino.

Founded in 2018, HqO has grown quickly, with its Real Estate Experience (REX) amenity platform boasting more than 185 customers covering 400 million square feet across 170 properties in 32 countries, and producing $200 million in funding from investors such as Cushman & Wakefield, JLL Spark, Navitas Capital and Suffolk Technologies.

In October 2023, HqO announced it had closed a $50 million Series D round for a total of $156.9 million in funding. The company spent some of that cash the following January when it acquired Symbiosy, a European platform for building management technology, from parent HB Reavis. Symbiosy’s data management and visualization tools, among other technologies, are especially used in buildings in London, Berlin and Warsaw.

HqO continues to evolve, Garbarino told Commercial Observer in a September 2023 interview: “We own the largest data set — 1.3 million employees at a lot of very large Fortune 2000 companies — kind of the standard assessment of how they feel about their workplace. We have the industry standard data model and assessment base of large tech companies concerning what their employees say is important to them about the office and how they’re currently supported in those things.”

The data originally appealed most to companies that were in turn trying to appeal to their employees and prospective employees. That’s evolved, according to Garbarino. 

“Now we’re providing this service to the real estate operators,” he said, “because the employers are coming to us saying, ‘Look, our employees have certain needs out of the property and we don’t control those things. We need our real estate partners to take action on these with us. If they don’t, we’re not going to stay with them. We’re going to go to other people that will be our partner in what is an incredibly challenging time of getting our employees back to the office.’ ”