Gable Raises $16M to Streamline Remote Work

Israeli startup Gable has raised $16 million to make advances to its remote work tool.

Companies “find it hard to provide workspaces across locations, stay on top of budgets, and have insight into how the spaces are being utilized,” Co-founder and CEO Liza Mash Levin said in a Tuesday (Feb. 28) press release. “That’s where Gable comes in.”

The 3-year-old company provides a portal for managing employees’ remote working options, letting workers search for and book spots at workspaces in 26 different countries.

Gable says it will use the funding to expand its sales, customer success and marketing teams to target larger enterprise customers. It will also hire more engineers and product team employees at its Israel offices to extend its product.

The funding comes as the question of where employees will work has become a hot-button topic, with a number of larger companies — Disney and Morgan Stanley among them — saying they wanted to see their workers back at their desks.

Cities are reportedly feeling the effect of people working from home, with remote workers costing New York more than $12 billion a year, as employees spend less time in Manhattan.

“If less income tax is being paid in New York City,” Comptroller Brad Lander told Bloomberg News, “then it’s hard to figure out how to capture enough value to maintain the subways and invest in the schools and keep the city safe and clean and all the things that really matter.”

(On the other hand, PYMNTS data has found that remote workers shop online twice as much as their in-office colleagues.)

Other companies have taken more relaxed approach to remote work, such as Milan Parikh, CFO at workplace equity platform Syndio.

“Fundamentally, I think it comes down to how do we keep people productive no matter where they are,” Parikh told PYMNTS in Janaury.

“I think there’s some revolt and some rebellion that’s happening right now [around the return to office]. So I think we’re going to come to a new paradigm in terms of what balance means around being in the office versus working from home,” Parikh said.

Meanwhile, recent research by PYMNTS finds a widening income gap between workers who do their jobs from home and ones who are required to go to work.

Higher income consumers are now 78% likelier than their low-income counterparts to have jobs they can perform from home, according to “The ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Report: Digitally Divided — Work, Health and the Income Gap.”

That study found that 71% of high-income consumers work remotely from home at least sometimes, a 10% increase since last year. But just 40% of lower-income consumers said they worked remotely last month, down 15% from last year.