second home
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Assistive technologies will be a $26 billion dollar market, and investors are only now addressing it
Rohan Silva is obsessed with social mobility and why certain groups are so under-represented in the technology industry.
He co-founded Second Home, a coworking space looking to bring together disparate civic-minded, cultural, creative and commercial entrepreneurs at sites in Lisbon, London and (now) Los Angeles, and he has spent years examining how gender, race and class impact access to technology as a now-reformed politician. Throughout that work though, one area that he says he overlooked was accessibility and entrepreneurship focused on people with disabilities.
“At Second Home, we pride ourselves on having a diverse community. I can count on one hand the number of founders with disabilities we have in our community, so there is definitely something going profoundly wrong,” Silva says.
Enlisting the help of the European venture capital fund Atomico, Silva has set up a micro-investment fund of £100,000 to tackle the problem.
“It’s a large amount compared to what I have and a small amount compared to most venture capital funds,” he explains. “The much bigger prize here is the ability to fund technologies that have the opportunities to improve the lives of people with disabilities.”
Silva isn’t alone. Organizations like Not Impossible Labs, a Los Angeles-based company, and startups like OrCam Technologies, eSight, B-Temia, Kinova Robotics, Open Bionics, Voiceitt and Whill are harnessing technology to bring solutions to people with disabilities across the world.
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Second Home closing in on new £20M funding round to bring its ‘creative workspace’ to more locations
Second Home, the “creative workspace” company co-founded by Rohan Silva, a former tech and startup policy advisor for then British Prime Minister David Cameron, is closing in on a new funding round, TechCrunch has learned.
According to sources, the London startup, which is also co-founded by Sam Aldenton, has secured £20 million in investment from Boston-based investor Gerald Chan, who owns Hang Lung Group with his brother Ronnie Chan. Both were the first investors in Xiaomi, and Gerald Chan recently gave the biggest-ever philanthropic gift to Harvard University, totaling a hefty $350 million.
I understand that the injection of capital will be used to expand to L.A. in the U.S., and possibly another five locations, as Second Home continues to scale up its operations and the number of physical locations it has under management. The funding could be announced as soon as next week.
Second Home’s existing investors include: Yuri Milner, Index Ventures, Atomico, Talis Capital, Tencent founder Martin Lau and former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill.
The company’s original East London site opened in November 2014. It then opened Second Home Lisbon in 2016, and added another London space in Holland Park this year. A third London Second Home in Clerkenwell Green will open its doors next month.
I’m told that all three are fully occupied, and Silva has previously said that 97 percent of new customers come via referrals and other “organic channels.”
Meanwhile, the companies, charities and teams based at Second Home across various sites include energy upstart Bulb (which employs 280 people located at Spitalfields), Threads Styling, Help Refugees, Kickstarter, TaskRabbit, Vice Media, Spotify, Volkswagen, Taylor Wessing, Ermenegildo Zegna and others.
Silva couldn’t be reached for comment at the time of publication. I’ll update this article if and when I hear back.
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