In the first half of 2019, Breather, a Montreal-based flexible workspace provider, added the new spaces between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Its West Coast portfolio now sits at over 110 spaces. San Francisco locations include the Financial District, South of Market and South Beach. Its new Los Angeles space sit within West Hollywood. (The Logic)

Talking point: The company has been actively positioning itself as an anti-WeWork by offering clustered, private office spaces, unlike WeWork’s shared-space offerings. In a March interview with The Logic, Bryan Murphy, Breather’s CEO, said its “hub-and-spoke” model clusters locations together to give customers access to more space. He declined to share which new markets the company was targeting, instead saying it would focus on existing markets like San Francisco and Toronto. Since October 2018, the company has also been offering long-term spaces in an effort to expand its consumer base; at the time, Breather said its 16,000 corporate clients were requesting longer terms. Despite these new additions, Breather is still nowhere near the scale of WeWork; the latter adds between 500,000 to 1,000,000 square feet of new space every month, according to a January CB Insights report. Meanwhile, these Breather additions for the first half of 2019 represent 30,245 square feet of space. “There’s always pressure to grow … We’re not one of those companies willing to grow just for growth’s sake,” Murphy said when asked if there was investor pressure.