Brooklyn’s Industry City a Surprising Oasis for Proptech Startup

From Coworking Desk to Company Headquarters: How Industry City Grows With You

Finding the right office space is one of the most consequential decisions a growing company makes. At Industry City, we built a different answer to that problem — a full spectrum of workspace, from flexible coworking and private offices to large-scale dedicated office headquarters, so companies don’t have to leave when they grow.

Commercial Observer sat down with Openigloo founder and CEO Allia Mohamed to tell exactly that story. Mohamed arrived at Industry City as a Brooklyn neighbor and campus regular, signed on for a coworking desk, and never left — scaling through two distinct office phases to a 4,550 square foot purpose-built headquarters, all on the same Sunset Park campus.

It’s a great read on what it actually looks like when a startup finds its long-term home — and why the right office environment is about more than four walls.

Read the full piece from Commercial Observer below:

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Brooklyn resident Allia Mohamed, CEO and co-founder of rental platform Openigloo, used to go to Brooklyn’s Industry City as a patron of its restaurants, shopping and events. Eventually, Mohamed also saw a place to grow her startup company.

Living in what she called “the south slope” of Brooklyn, Mohamed was intrigued with the idea of bringing the nascent Openigloo to Industry City, a historic shipping, warehousing and manufacturing complex on the Upper New York Bay waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood. Although not known as a proptech startup incubator, the complex’s 6 million-square-foot ecosystem offered bustling workspaces along with its other attractions. 

In other words, it had a vibe. And it was walking distance from her home.

“As someone in the neighborhood, I used to go to an event, go to Japan village and check out the restaurants, the holiday gifts and things like that for many years,” Mohamed said. “So, when I was eventually looking for space, it made sense for me to inquire a little bit further.”

There’s an old saying in real estate that if you want to know where a company is headquartered, just find out where the CEO lives.

“Yes, guilty as charged,” said Mohamed, laughing. “But I will say we had considered others. The Financial District was very close to me as well and I’d spent years commuting to Wall Street. There’s great commercial spaces there as well that were attractive. But, ultimately, we really liked the authenticity of the Industry City campus — the fact that people from all over the city come to this space, and that it wasn’t just all bankers, all tech, all fashion or all lawyers.

“There’s a kombucha brewery in Industry City, there’s seamstress businesses, as well as tech entrepreneurs. So I just really like being in the type of ecosystem that is a little bit more dynamic and interesting.”

Having founded Openigloo in 2020 with a single coworking desk in Industry City, Mohamed has led the company’s growth on the campus through two subsequent distinct phases — as a small private office, and its current  purpose-built headquarters, which she believes reflects a broader shift among proptech and startup tenants toward spaces that can scale alongside them operationally.

“Openigloo is a marketplace to help renters find better buildings and landlords, but also the multifamily operators that work with us,” said Mohamed. “So renters come to our platform to share views about their rental experiences, to access municipal data on properties that they’re considering, and search for quality apartments.”

Mohamed’s personal experiences led to the company’s launch. 

“The reason we started this platform is because I’ve struggled as a renter in New York City,” she said. “I’ve had my fair share of horrible landlords. I was frustrated by the fact that I had to hand over a million and one documents to get an apartment, but I really got no information in return on who was the landlord. Do they take care of their building? Do they take care of their renters? So that was the genesis of the idea. Since then it’s evolved into a marketplace that has supported nearly 3 million New York City renters with their apartment hunt.”

Openigloo claims that it has built the city’s largest crowdsourced database of apartment reviews, with roughly 1,000 new verified reviews added each month.

“The biggest thing that renters have been attracted to with us is the trust layer and the information that we’re giving them that they cannot find anywhere else on a granular level,” Mohamed said. “So everything from, “Are there any open violations in this building?” to the landlord returning security deposits. That’s how detailed we’re getting. So renters are getting a lot of value, and that’s what’s allowed us to grow as a community of New York City renters.”

Openigloo uses proprietary artificial intelligence overlayed on general AI platforms to aid renters and landlords, said Mohamed.

“AI is absolutely a part of our fabric as we continue to grow, as long as it helps renters find quality apartments,” she explained. “One of the ways that we’re leveraging AI is we know what renters are looking for, what they like, what their preferences are, so we can leverage those tools to make sure that apartments that are coming to market that meet their criteria are in their inbox in real time. Same thing on the landlord side, as we’re saving the landlords a lot of time by making sure that the leads that we bring to their door are high-intent, authenticated and financially eligible for those spaces, and have all the information that they need before showing up for the tour.”

It is somewhat unusual for a tech startup to grow physically in one location. Mohamed had a vision based on her background in the financial industry.

“I worked on Wall Street in sales and trading, so I grew up on a trading floor,” explained the Ottawa native. “It’s what brought me to New York City to begin with. There were definitely influences from that experience, such as the way that our office is set up today. I always loved being in an environment where you could stand up and scream at someone from across the floor and get their attention. So that’s exactly how the Openigloo office is oriented. And it was great that Industry City had those types of spaces where I could bring that vision.”

Openigloo has grown from two people at a coworking desk, to a few people in 900 square feet, to a company that has tripled in size within a 4,550-square-foot office. “We work in the real estate industry in New York, so it was important for us to be able to create our own space that really reflected our culture and personality,” Mohamed said. “We got a blank canvas of 900 square feet, set it up how we wanted, and we started growing the team from there.”

Mohamed declined to speak about the rent Openigloo is paying for its space, but said that the company will be located there for the next five years.

Such location stability in Brooklyn is a core factor in Openigloo’s identity and talent recruiting, said Mohamed.

“The team is largely made up of New Yorkers, many of them Brooklyn-based, and Industry City has become a natural extension of that,” she said. “The new office was designed in-house as a ‘builder’s space,’ with custom meeting rooms, a hands-on layout, and a strong emphasis on collaboration, more akin to a product studio than a traditional office.

“The campus itself has become an extension of that — used for team events, content and day-to-day employee experience, which we credit as a meaningful factor in retention and growth.”

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Learn more about leasing space at Industry City here or by emailing lease@industrycity.com