WeWork Sells Its Stake In The Wing To Google Ventures, TV Star Mindy Kaling
WeWork's strategy to excise all non-core businesses from its balance sheet continues apace.
The company announced on Wednesday that it has disposed of the minority ownership stake it held in women-focused coworking operator The Wing, Reuters reports.
WeWork's stake was split between multiple buyers, including Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital (which had already invested in earlier fundraising rounds) and writer/director/actress Mindy Kaling, best known for her show The Mindy Project and her role on revered workplace comedy The Office.
A sale price was not disclosed for WeWork's share of The Wing, which it acquired when it led a $32M Series B fundraising round in 2017. Since that time, The Wing has expanded to nine locations, including one in London. Its success was apparently not enough to convince WeWork Executive Chairman Marcelo Claure to make an exception to his plan of selling off all acquisitions made under the leadership of former CEO Adam Neumann.
Since SoftBank Group took majority ownership of WeWork in November and installed Claure to lead its board, it has managed to sell off three of those acquisitions, the first of which was search engine optimization firm Conductor. The startup's founders bought back control of Conductor, much like Managed by Q's founders are still in negotiations to do for their own company.
In mid-January, WeWork sold Teem, which operates software for optimizing meeting room usage, to iOffice. WeWork decided to shut down the operations of Spacious, a rival it acquired just as its initial public offering began unraveling in August, rather than sell it, Reuters reports.
WeGrow, the elementary school spearheaded by Adam's wife, Rebekah Neumann, will cease operations at the conclusion of the 2020 school year.
Claure and his revamped C-suite have also focused on cutting costs to reverse the pattern of escalating losses that WeWork had been following under Neumann and the aggressive growth plan encouraged by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. Cuts have involved the layoff of thousands of WeWork employees and an abrupt halt to its voracious pace of leasing.
