WeWork To Acquire Meetup

WeWork’s acquisition spree continues.

WeWork will acquire Meetup, Crunchbase News has learned, adding another purchase to the rapidly expanding rental startup’s roster.

The $20 billion coworking space pioneer is set to acquire New York City-based community platform Meetup, according to an internal Meetup meeting that took place today. Meetup CEO and co-founder Scott Heiferman announced the move internally, telling employees “we are being acquired by WeWork.”

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The company-wide meeting comes after weeks of internal speculation concerning the long-running independent startup’s direction. Internal records at Meetup hinted at the deal in recent months.

Meetup declined to comment. WeWork declined to comment.

Meetup hasn’t taken part in a funding event since 2014, and it has, over the years, only taken about $19 million in investments according to Crunchbase. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) led two of its rounds, participating in the rest, also according to Crunchbase.

CEO Heiferman also said the acquisition would allow the firm to double in size. In the same meeting, he mentioned a $30 million figure. It was not clear if that was an acquisition price, or a reference to expected investment into his company from the acquiring entity.

The startup, which has 35 million Meetup members and over 300,000 “IRL” community meetups to date, is still hiring for several jobs, according to its website. However, the acquisition also comes on the heels of several Meetup employees being asked to voluntarily resign, which was confirmed to Crunchbase News by an internal source on condition of anonymity.

According to Crunchbase data, WeWork and Meetup do not share investors. The official acquisition announcement is expected to come tomorrow morning.

To date, WeWork has raised close to $10 billion, including $4.4 billion in a private equity round last August. The company has recently purchased the Lord & Taylor flagship store and New York-based coding academy Flatiron School.