As we noted a few months ago, Concur is growing so fast that it can’t quite keep up with demand. A company like this needs more people to help support that growth, and that means more office space.
That’s exactly what Concur’s sweet new digs in downtown Bellevue, Wash. offers — and a whole lot more. The maker of travel and entertainment expense management software marked the opening of its move from Redmond to the more urban setting on Thursday afternoon, as the Bellevue Mayor Conrad Lee helped welcome the company to his city.
Concur now occupies floors 7 through 12 at a high-rise just down the street from the Expedia headquarters. The new offices take up 122,000 square feet — about 20 percent bigger than the Redmond space — and says a lot of the Concur as a company.
“The transparency, the open glass windows, the light, the energy you feel walking around the building — it represents the soul of our company,” Concur president and co-founder Rajeev Singh said.
Concur, which has offices worldwide, invited its 620 employees and their families out to the new HQ on Thursday, as hundreds gathered outside the skyscraper to hear the founders and Lee say a few words.
“Bellevue is very fortunate that we have been endowed and blessed with all the tech companies and all the smart people here in the city,” Lee said. “Having Concur come here gives us confidence and helps us set the vision for how this can really be a place to live, socialize and interact at.”
The biggest reason for Concur’s relocation was that the Redmond office was simply too small in terms of the company’s long-term growth and space strategy. The Bellevue area was also appealing with direct access to restaurants, hotels, amenities and a transit center.
Concur’s move into the city continues a pattern of tech companies doing the same thing, and most notably Amazon in downtown Seattle.
Amazon, which had its old HQ just outside of downtown at Beacon Hill, is looking to transform a portion of the city with a proposed office project just a few blocks away from its current South Lake Union campus. The project, which could take more than six years to complete, will include three 37-story office towers encompassing about 3.3 million square feet. Plans are also in the works for a massive biosphere spherical greenhouse-like structure capable of housing multiple forms of plant life as well as mature trees.
Like Amazon, Concur has grown rapidly over the past 20 years. The company has some impressive bookings performance as of late and recently made several acquisitions and investments in part through its new venture capital fund.
“This is just another milestone, another step along the way,” co-founder Steve Singh said of the new office. “We have another 20-to-30 years of great experiences yet to go before we hand it over to the next generation.”
Check out more photos of Concour’s new crib below. Scott Torrey, executive VP of operations, told me that there’s 50-to-60 percent more collaboration space in the Bellevue office, which you can see from the pictures.
