Flex Workspace Company Breather Hires Former eBay Exec As CEO
Breather, a company that provides a platform for on-demand rental of private office space on month-by-month or shorter terms, has named e-commerce veteran Bryan Murphy as its new CEO.
Murphy will drive Breather's expansion following a $45M funding round last year that brought total funds raised to $122M, according to the company. Currently Breather offers access to over 500 workspaces in 10 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London.
A form of coworking, Breather's platform is something like Airbnb, but for office space. Clients use its website to pick both a workplace — from among those landlords that partner with Breather — and a rental duration, from a few hours to much longer.
Breather also counts as an event-space platform, offering space for meetings or other business functions on relatively short notice compared to standard meeting space.
Most recently, Murphy was founder and president of mattress startup Tomorrow Sleep, a Serta Simmons company that offers mattresses and other sleep-related products online.
Before that, he was a vice president at eBay. Murphy joined eBay's leadership after selling WHI Solutions, an SaaS and e-commerce company that he co-founded, to eBay in 2012.
Coworking as a whole is growing rapidly. Emergent Research predicts the number of coworking employees will grow from 1.74 million worldwide in 2017 to 5.1 million in 2022, for an average annual growth rate of 24.2%.
