A venue rental marketplace based in San Francisco has hired a former NerdWallet executive to lead the startup.
Peerspace announced on Tuesday that Kevin Yuann has joined the 10-year-old company as its new CEO, taking over for Eric Shoup, who had been in the role since early 2018 and will remain as an advisor through the end of May.
Yuann spent the past decade at NerdWallet, a consumer financial advice site, where he was most recently chief business officer. He now joins Peerspace during a period of growth.
Peerspace says it has been profitable over the past year, and it also recently crossed $100 million in total revenue in addition to $500 million in gross bookings value, with 80% of those sales paid out to venues in its marketplace.
The company wouldn't say if it's targeting an initial public offering on Wall Street.
Yuann was a vice president at San Francisco-based NerdWallet for more than four years until early 2021 when he was promoted to chief business officer, and NerdWallet debuted on the Nasdaq that November.
After a prolonged freeze, the IPO market began to open up late last year.
Instacart debuted in September, followed by Reddit six months later.
"I'm really excited with the growth opportunity here," Yuann said. "The goal is, let's grow this business into something substantial that can, one, create a lot of value for guests and hosts. And create value for the employees and investors. And ... we'll do what's right for the company. If (an IPO) makes sense for the company, we'll pursue that as a path but there could be many different outcomes."
Peerspace currently has close to 90 employees, and while the company is based in San Francisco, it maintains a fully remote workforce.
Other companies have rolled back their work-from-home policies over the past couple of years, either partially or fully ending flexible work policies that proliferated during the outset of Covid-19.
Peerspace will continue to maintain its fully remote work policies and culture, Yuann said, which includes several in-person staff events throughout the year.
Chief Strategy Officer Rony Chammas and Senior Vice President of Global Operations Matthew Bendett co-founded Peerspace in 2013.
They developed the company as a marketplace where people could find venues to rent for social events like birthday parties, meetings and weddings.
Customers have also booked venues for events like Taylor Swift album listening parties, Super Bowl watch parties, graduations, baby showers and even weddings.
Over the past decade, Peerspace has also expanded its offerings to include venues and sites suitable for film and TV productions. The company also says it counts Fortune 500 companies as customers.
In the future, Peerspace also plans on adding additional services to help users manage all aspects of event planning.
"If someone wants to book a birthday party or a baby shower in a space, it's not as easy as just picking the space. You've got to think about all the things that go into that in terms of catering, any sort of activities, clean up," Yuann said. "I think we have a real opportunity to solve that and make it easy."
The company also continues to build out its artificial intelligence strategy, which includes using large language models from other providers like OpenAI to integrate automation into features like venue onboarding, generating descriptions for listings and offering a scheduling assistant for location viewing appointments.
In the future, Peerspace could also use image processing tools to suggest similar venues.
It's about "removing all of these friction-filled steps," Chammas said.
Peerspace has raised more than $40 million over the past decade from GV, Foundation Capital and other investors.
