$20 billion startup WeWork continues its shopping spree with $200 million for Meetup

Scott Legato/Getty

• WeWork announced on Tuesday that it bought Meetup, a website for organizing group trips and events. 
• Terms of the deal weren’t announced, but Axios said the price was around $ 200 million.
• Meetup is only one of a slew of new investments and purchases the $ 20 billion startup has made in recent months. 

WeWork, the startup building a network of coworking offices and apartments, announced on Tuesday that it had bought Meetup, a service that makes it easy for groups to start regular meetings in real life. 

The price for Meetup was around $ 200 million, Axios reported, although terms of the deal were not announced. Meetup had raised $ 18 million in venture funding from blue-chip firms including DFJ, Union Square Ventures, and Allen & Co. 

Meetup runs a website that lets people create, organize and join groups around specific interests, usually for the sake of hosting events and inviting people to them. According to WeWork, it has 35 million members in 300,000 groups that host 500,000 events per month. 

WeWork has raised over $ 8 billion in funding to date, with $ 4.4 billion booked since July from Softbank and the Softbank Vision Fund, giving the startup a $ 20 billion valuation and the title of New York City’s most valuable startup. 

So what’s WeWork to do with that money? Make a lot of acquisitions, apparently. Meetup as a purchase makes a lot of sense for WeWork — lots of Meetups already happen in WeWork locations. 100,000 people have gone to a Meetup meeting at a WeWork this year, the company said.

But some of WeWork’s other acquisitions are less obviously applicable to its business. Take a look: 

Earlier this month, it was revealed that in 2016, WeWork had purchased a large stake in Wavegarden, a maker of wave pools.

Wavegarden

Source: Wall Street Journal 

WeWork bought FieldLens, a mobile communications app for construction workers, in June for an undisclosed price.

Fieldlens

Source: TechCrunch

In August, WeWork announced that it had acquired Israeli startup Unomy, a popular sales platform. It was shut down on September 20.

Unomy

Source: TechCrunch

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Feedburner