Designing a low carbon economy

At the end of 2019, Canoa set out to change the way businesses shopped for the office. Now, just over 2 years and a global pandemic since our founding, we are thrilled to announce the raise of $8.7M in seed funding led by Eclipse Ventures, TMV, Building Ventures, and Gemini Ventures, bringing our total funding to just over $10m.

A b2b marketplace, Canoa is the only spatial design tool with an embedded furniture marketplace for new and second hand goods, allowing enterprise teams to design, shop and manage their portfolio of spaces and ff&e in a single web-based tool for the first time.

Canoa is quickly building the rails on which businesses can make the transition to a fully circular consumption model of their ff&e, tethering together critical data, workflows and a business model that biases long term thinking. Our approach will help these businesses drastically reduce furniture and demolition waste, a critical component as enterprises balance evolving workplace needs with ESG objectives.

After growing more than 10x in the last year, launching the best-in-class browser-based ff&e design tool and order management system (OMS), onboarding more than 20 businesses and their in-house design teams, launching a private Beta program for small independent designers and building what is quickly becoming one of the best teams in the industry, we could not be more excited for what lies ahead.

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How we started

From 2015 to 2018, I had the chance to lead the design team that drove WeWork’s physical growth from a handful of locations to more than 500 in a window of just over 4 years. It was there that we identified the enormous blind spot that commercial interiors, and ff&e in particular, represent in the discussions of sustainability and the built environment even though more than 50% of landfill waste comes from demolition waste and at least 7% from furniture waste according to the EPA.

Much of this comes from the endless cycle of construction and demolition of interior commercial spaces and not from demolishing full structures as it is often assumed. The way we were designing offices before the pandemic was only adding to this cycle and we needed to stop.

Since then, the COVID pandemic has forced a complete restructuring of how businesses think about where and how their teams do their best work. Though a hard shift for most, this once-in-a-generation event affords us an opportunity for drastic improvements in the way that we conceive of our physical space.

This is why we started Canoa.

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What lies ahead

Gone are the days of surveillance through forced co-location. We are instead entering a new era for spatial design that looks to inspire, uplift, and nurture.

The pandemic, it seems, has finally unlocked the future that technology had already paved the way for. In this new world where the question of why to come into an office requires real intention, we get the chance to dream up new, uplifting and supportive spaces that are more flexible, sustainable, and less mechanical than ever before–and we couldn’t be more excited to tackle this massive problem.

Though it will probably take another decade or so to settle on what the 21st century work experience will look like, we are already helping businesses:

• Build less
• Buy better
• Waste nothing

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Humbly,

Federico Negro and the rest of the CANOA team.

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