The Startup Catching the Pieces: How Letswork Is Rewiring Office Space
On a November call from what he insists is “not a break, it’s a work trip” in Portugal, Hamza Khan sounds less like a founder doing PR and more like someone walking you through a system diagram.
“We’ve basically evolved and grown to help cater to companies of all shapes and sizes in whatever format they choose to work under,” he says. “Whether they’re fully in the office, whether they’re fully remote, or they’re somewhere in between and operate on a hybrid model, we work with companies along the entire spectrum.”
That spectrum is the key to understanding how Letswork is different, and how its model has quietly shifted from “Airbnb for workspaces” to something more structurally interesting.
From “find me a café” to an asset-light infrastructure play
Letswork started in Emaar’s E25 entrepreneurship programme, when Khan and co-founder Omar AlMheiri were trying to solve their own irritation with Dubai. They were shuttling between meetings with nowhere reliable to sit: patchy Wi-Fi, annoyed baristas, and no sockets.
Instead of opening yet another coworking brand, they flipped the model. Rather than sign leases and build their own spaces, they partnered with underused daytime real estate – hotel lobbies, cafés, existing coworking operators – and made them bookable through a single pass.
“We started six years ago simply as a way to help connect people to spaces,” Khan says. “People looking for interesting spaces to work from, they could book them out on the app. That was it.”
The first users were freelancers and solo founders who needed “an office outside the office.” The product was a day pass and then a simple membership.
“Initially our primary target customer was individuals and freelancers,” he says. “Then people with small companies started joining us. Then companies with larger companies started joining us.”
That is where the model began to evolve. Those bigger customers were not content with nice third spaces. They wanted event venues, boardrooms and eventually long-term offices.
“Some of them were using us for the remote workspaces,” Khan says. “Some of them requested to use us for event spaces. And then we started receiving requests for people looking for long-term spaces as well. The requests have just been coming in and that is just meeting supply with that demand. Really, that is all we have been doing.”
What looks like incremental feature creep is actually a structural shift: from a convenience app to an asset-light “workspace infrastructure” layer that can sit underneath very different kinds of companies.
Three products, one network
Today, Letswork really runs three businesses on top of the same partner network.
The original pass – a subscription or credits model that lets individuals and teams work from partner cafés, hotels and coworking spaces – remains the core engine.
“The pass system that we had, that is still one of our major products,” Khan says. “And still today, it brings us the most revenue, to be honest. It is one of the major sort of business verticals of ours.”
The second leg is what he calls “an office classified business” – effectively a focused Property Finder for long-term offices. Instead of trawling brokers and WhatsApp groups, companies can use Letswork to search and secure a dedicated space.
The third is a booking layer for meeting rooms and event spaces: boardrooms, ballrooms, off-sites and workshops.
“People looking to hold events or meetings can book spaces for those on our platform,” he says. “So the pass is still a major function of our product, of our business, but we have two other growing sides of business as well.”
The model has evolved from selling a day in a lobby to offering multiple ways to consume workspace – pay-as-you-go desks, private offices, one-off events – all mediated by software that lets employers control budget, access and reporting.
That puts Letswork closer to being infrastructure than a classic coworking brand. It does not own or lease the spaces. It orchestrates them.
The UAE–Saudi–Egypt corridor, not Midtown Manhattan
The other way Letswork looks different is on a map.
“We are now in fifteen markets,” Khan says. “Individuals and companies of all shapes and sizes use us across multiple jurisdictions, so not just the UAE. The top three markets at the moment are still very much the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.”
Saudi has been live for around two years. Egypt launched in June and grew quickly for particular reasons.
“Egypt has become quite big for us, and we are very excited about it, because it solves a key problem there, which is just access to space, which is convenient to everyone,” he says. “Cairo is such a massive city. People struggle with commute times and struggle with finding quality workspaces for their employees, especially for companies that have overseas HQs, and they have large teams in Egypt.”
Globally, flexible workspace is forecast to keep compounding as companies trade long leases for hybrid setups. In the Middle East, coworking and flex space are growing even faster than the global average, with the UAE and Saudi Arabia among the most significant demand centres. Letswork is deliberately building in that corridor first, then extending outwards to a ring of emerging cities from Jeddah and Istanbul to Accra and Lagos.
“Geographic expansion is still significant for us,” Khan says. “We are going to be launching in more and more countries every quarter throughout 2026. Turkey just went live with us this month. We are looking at Southeast Asia as well for a lot of next year as well as the UK.”
Compare that with the incumbents. WeWork has just emerged from Chapter 11 after slashing leases and shrinking its footprint to roughly half its peak. IWG, the owner of Regus and Spaces, has more than 4,000 centres in over 120 countries and is growing through franchising and management contracts. Upflex and Deskpass aggregate thousands of third-party spaces, but are densest in North America and Western Europe.
On paper, Letswork is the same species as those aggregators: asset-light, software-heavy, sitting on top of other people’s real estate. In practice, its map and mix of spaces – hospitality, independent venues, and local coworking operators in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt corridor – are where it tries to stand out.
What sits on top of the space: distribution and AI-driven churn
The other differentiator is what Letswork does with the people moving through those venues.
“What we are also doing is more marketing-related efforts as well because we have a pretty strong grip on the ecosystem now in the UAE,” Khan says.
With Wio Bank, Letswork is less a workspace platform and more a distribution channel.
“We have a partnership for November and December where they are promoting their banking services to our clients,” he says. “They have offered six months of free banking services to our customers, which is quite attractive for them, and priority banking setup.”
On top of that, Wio is hosting weekly lunches, networking and speed-networking sessions and lunch-and-learn events for Letswork members, and installing branded phone booths in some partner cafés so people can take Zoom calls in private.
The Emirates NBD pilot, born from its National Development Talent Incubation programme, pushes that logic into HR and real estate strategy. Selected bank staff get access to Letswork’s network as a flexible workspace benefit.
“It came up as a product of a longer-term relationship we had,” Khan says. “We were one of the first twelve or so companies that were working with Emirates NBD in that manner. We learned a lot from that organisation. We finally signed a pilot with them as well a year later, and are now in the process of rolling that out.”
Founders and freelancers may see an app to find a desk. Banks see a way to trial hybrid work and sell services to the same audience. That second layer – using space as a way to route distribution – is part of how the model has evolved beyond pure bookings.
The last piece is the backdrop Khan is watching: AI and headcount.
“One thing happening is larger organisations with 100,000 employees now shrinking to 60,000 employees because a lot of the tasks are being automated,” he says. “And then the other thing could be AI being used to accelerate growth. So companies which were, say, fifteen people, like Letswork for example, suddenly become fifty people because we are now doing fifty different things and we are maximising the use of AI.”
Hybrid work has already become the baseline. Some firms will need less space; others will need more; almost all will be more distributed and cross-border.
“We are going to see companies growing and companies shrinking and we are also going to see cross-continent, transnational change as well,” he says. “The growth will not just be limited to where your office is. The growth will be with remote work, and the ease with which you can hire people around the world is going to become more common.”
“So there is going to be a lot of movement in the commercial real estate world,” he adds. “And has been for the last few years. We are here to catch these pieces of pie.”
That is where Letswork’s difference really sits: not in any single feature, but in how its model has evolved. From a pass for better cafés, to three product lines on one asset-light network, to a platform that sells both workspace and access to the people inside it, aimed first at a corridor most global players still treat as peripheral.
“How we keep up,” Khan says, “is consistently having the best customer support and the best value proposition to our clients. And I think that is stuff that applies to any company, really.”
The test now is whether that mix–evolved model, different map, second-order distribution play is enough to hold its own in a market where giants, landlords and software platforms are all chasing the same slice.