Fresh off a $16 million Series A, Chicago-area startup Logik.io made a move to bigger headquarters in suburban Deerfield this summer.
Triple the size of its previous offices in Highland Park, the new space will help support a bigger team whose head count has doubled since the beginning of the year.
Logik.io's team expansion has come as startups across the country have faced job cuts throughout 2023. According to layoff tracker layoff.fyi, 985 tech companies have laid off more than 233,000 employees in 2023. That's up from nearly 165,000 layoffs in 2022.
Logik.io, however, has been able to capitalize amid the chaos.
"We were able to pick up really good experienced people," CEO Chris Shutts told Chicago Inno. "We did a really good job of targeting those people that were laid from very specific companies that we knew had the expertise that we needed."
With the additional employees came the need for additional space.
While the tech startup said it has seen 300% year-over-year revenue growth from the first half of 2022 to the same time frame in 2023, the move to Deerfield comes as few tech startups are expanding their real estate footprint. Rather, more often companies have looked to downsize as work-from-home trends have continued to persist.
Shutts, on the other hand, thinks tech companies' investment in their office space has been somewhat mixed.
"If you look at Eric Yuan, the founder of Zoom, he told everybody to come back. That's interesting because their product is essentially [for] remote work," he said. "Goldman Sachs did the same thing, and so did Amazon. But then you have the founder of Atlassian and their entire company is remote, and that's like a $12 billion [company]."
Shutts doesn't think there's been a one-size-fits-all approach to the workplace post-Covid, so he's focusing on what he thinks is best for his team.
"Personally, I really like people being in the office," he said. "What we did was we said everybody come in two days a week."
Shutts added that the tech startup got great value for the sublease at its new space.
"The landlord had a bunch of office furniture that had never been used and offered to give us all of that, which was a great deal," he said.
Shutts said the $50,000 to $60,000 worth of office equipment including motorized desks helped "sweeten" the deal.
