How Letswork went from a Dubai cafe-finder to civic infrastructure, and what its public-park deal says about where the global flex office is heading next

Every major operator in the global flexible workspace business has been racing toward the same model for the past three years. WeWork rebuilt itself out of bankruptcy on a slimmer footprint. CBRE bought Industrious for around $400 million. International Workplace Group, parent of Regus and Spaces, signed 1,132 new centres in 2025 alone, almost all under capital-light franchise or management deals. They are all chasing a workspace network that scales without taking on the property risk that nearly killed WeWork.

Yet none of them could have signed the deal Letswork just signed this month.

Under a public-private partnership announced by Dubai Municipality, the UAE-headquartered hybrid workspace platform has been awarded the contract to operate workspace inside Dubai’s public parks. The first destination opens at Al Barsha Pond Park in May 2026, with hot desks, event venues, podcast studios and creative production facilities in modular units built off-site by Group AMANA’s DuBox arm. More park sites will follow. Bookings, access, and reporting will run through the same Letswork app that already serves freelancers, SMEs, and corporates across 15 markets.

The deal expands the addressable inventory of the flex office industry beyond commercial real estate. Public parks are not procurable through the leasing market. They belong to a city. And in this case, the city has handed the operating contract to a homegrown platform that started six years ago as a way to find a quieter cafe in Dubai.

A startup that began with patchy Wi-Fi has just been handed part of the city’s public realm

Letswork came out of Emaar’s E25 entrepreneurship programme, founded by Hamza Khan and Omar AlMheiri after they got tired of cafes with bad Wi-Fi and annoyed baristas. By 2025, the company was running three businesses on the same partner network: a day-pass-and-credits product, a focused property finder for long-term offices, and a booking layer for events. Khan told The Source Code in a previous interview that the company was deliberately positioning itself to “catch these pieces of pie” as commercial real estate fragmented under hybrid work and AI-driven workforce shifts. Tens of thousands of users now move through the Letswork network each month.

That is the platform Dubai Municipality has now plugged into its parks. “Our partnership with Dubai Municipality on the ‘Work from Park’ initiative represents a significant step toward redefining the future of flexible work in the UAE,” AlMheiri said. “By integrating our digital platform with Dubai’s world-class public parks, we are providing entrepreneurs, freelancers, and content creators with inspiring, tech-enabled environments that break the traditional office mould.”

Pricing stays anchored to the existing model. “The Al Barsha Pond Park flagship will operate as an open and flexible environment accessible to all Letswork members,” AlMheiri said.

The wider flex market is heading where Letswork has already gone

Goldman Sachs and several research firms place the global flex office market on track to grow from around $52 billion in 2026 to almost $195 billion by 2034. JLL projects flexible work will account for 30% of all office inventory by 2030, contributing more than $10 trillion to the global economy.

Growth at that rate cannot be funded with traditional commercial leases. WeWork’s collapse made the point unforgettably. The industry’s response has been a near-uniform pivot to asset-light models: IWG opened 95% of its 624 new centres in 2024 through managed partnerships rather than direct leases. Letswork has run on this principle since 2019, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt as its largest markets and Turkey newly live.

The opportunity in the Gulf alone is substantial. The UAE flexible office market sits at roughly $1.1 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach $1.8 billion by 2030. Saudi Arabia’s coworking market is growing at almost 12% annually. Foreign direct investment of $30.7 billion landed in the UAE in 2023, and Dubai alone registered 70,500 new companies in 2024.

What pushed Letswork toward parks was already showing up in the data

“Our insights show a clear trend towards work patterns that require a balance of productivity, leisure, and nature,” AlMheiri said. “There is a growing demand for ‘third spaces’ that support wellbeing alongside professional output. Research, such as a well-known study by the University of Exeter, indicates that employees in ‘green’ offices show a 15% increase in productivity, which validates our move into public greenery.”

The segments he expects to adopt fastest are already over-indexed in Letswork’s network: freelancers, SMEs, and digital content creators. The third group is where the inventory diverges sharply from anything a global aggregator could replicate. “We are particularly excited to launch specialised ‘Creative Spaces’ and podcast studios, ensuring that the next generation of innovators has the tools and the setting they need to thrive,” AlMheiri said. The studios are being “manufactured to the highest quality standards, ensuring efficient, high-fidelity environments for focused creative work with dedicated facilities tailored for audio production and high-quality recording.”

The creator economy is the second engine

The global creator economy is worth around $250 billion today and is expected to roughly double within three to four years. UAE livestreaming alone is on track to grow from $1.9 billion to $3.4 billion by 2030. Creators HQ at Emirates Towers has attracted 2,415 members from 147 countries since launching in early 2025, with a combined follower count exceeding 2 billion. The Dubai Creative Economy Strategy targets a doubling of the creative sector’s GDP contribution to 5% and an expansion of the creative workforce to 140,000 professionals.

Inserting podcast studios into a public park is, in that context, less a workspace decision than the operating layer of a national policy push. Letswork is the company running it.

The physical infrastructure comes from Group AMANA’s DuBox arm, which manufactures units off-site and assembles them on-site within days. Modular construction can cut on-site labour by up to 60% and waste by 35%. Reversible units inside a public park are a very different political proposition from permanent commercial buildings on the same land.

Tokyo opened a coworking space inside Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden at the end of 2024. WeWork operates a Hibiya Park Front location in Tokyo. New York’s Bryant Park is ringed by serviced office inventory, but none of it sits inside the park itself.

These don't present a multi-park, city-led rollout with content-creation infrastructure attached to a national creator-economy strategy, run by a single homegrown platform already operating flexible workspace at a regional scale.

A municipality has decided that public greenery is productive infrastructure

A modular construction firm is building the units off-site. A homegrown software platform is running the network on top. The arrangement opens private-sector participation in what was previously purely civic territory, in a city that has spent the past decade making itself a testbed for exactly this kind of public-private experimentation.

For Letswork, the partnership transforms the company from an operator of other people’s buildings into an operator of part of a city’s public realm. The next sites have not been named, but AlMheiri has indicated they will follow the same logic. “Locations will be chosen to support the Dubai 2040 Parks and Greenery Strategy and the Dubai Urban Plan 2040,” he said, “focusing on transforming parks into integrated urban spaces.”

Whether the model travels into other emirates, into the Saudi and Egyptian markets where the platform already runs, or into the further-afield expansion targets the company has flagged in the UK and Southeast Asia, will determine whether Work from Park reads as a Dubai-specific experiment or as the template for what comes after the office.

For AlMheiri, the broader signal is the one that matters. “This collaboration,” he said, “is a testament to Dubai’s commitment to building a sustainable, innovation-led economy.”

The first test arrives in May 2026, in a park.