【Ian Flanagan／Tansuo】Chinese Startup Disrupting Commercial Real Estate
Leader'sInfo
Ian Flanagan is the founder of Tansuo (Beijing, China), an online platform for finding office space in China.
2005-2008 University of York, Mathematics with Statistics.
2015-2016 CFO, PAPP'S TEA. Financial analysis, budgeting and forecasting, pricing strategy, accounting and control, inventory tracking and management, cap table management.
2016-2018 Senior Analyst, JLL. Consulting projects, white papers and quarterly reports on North China office markets.
Leader'sViewpoint
Backgrounds to launch your company/service
Tansuo is a an online platform for finding office space in China. We combine the market expertise of our consultants with big data and AI.
I previously at worked at JLL, the one of the largest commercial real estate services companies, and was inspired to offer the same important business services, but with technology at the core.
I taught my self 5 programming languages to create and launch the app.
Points where the service is differentiated
We make the market completely transparent. We remove information asymmetry and conflicts of interest
Tansuo works with 60,000 office buildings and 6,000 co-working spaces in 200 cities. Offline brokerages such as JLL, CBRE, Colliers etc. generally can only cover Grade A buildings in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities
We provide data on CO2 emissions, internet speed, pollution levels (PM2.5) and many other data points for each potential new office. There is no other brokerage or service that offers this.
The renting experience is much faster, because although we have local market experts to help you make decisions, most of the process is online and automated
The app is multi-language, removing the barriers to the China market
Future plans
We just closed angel-round at USD 7.8m valuation cap with several impressive investors, including a Fortune 500 CEO, a post-IPO startup founder, and a VC fund manager.
We are currently applying to China's most prestigious accelerator programs.
We are in talks with the worlds largest commercial real estate firms, targeting one of them to be the lead investor at Series A, combining their existing international structure with Tansuo's data, technology, brand and innovation.
Tansuo was recently featured on the NASDAQ board in Time Square, New York.
Knock-on Benefit
Helping one company lower their rent, get a better office, lower their CO2 emissions etc. means they can make their staff happier, increase salaries, invest more, and more easily acheive their business goals. Then their clients can more easily acheive *their* business goals etc. And with a scaleable platform, we can easily help every single company in China, and then in the world. I started Tansuo because I beleive we can boost the entire world's economy through knock-on benefits.
