With €27 million in revenue over a 10-month financial year, Comet returned to profitability in 2022 and is preparing new European openings by 2024.
After a forced shutdown in March 2020 and a gradual recovery as lockdowns eased, Comet posted solid results at the end of 2022, with revenue of €27 million over a 10-month financial year*. The company has therefore returned to profitability, in line with its forecasts. That growth is driven by service offerings designed to help businesses cope with hybrid ways of working, and by steady European expansion. The trend is faithful to the model championed by Comet's founders since the company was created in 2016: a measured balance between growth and profitability. Following that trajectory, Comet will open new venues across Europe by 2024.
Turning the crisis into an opportunity
Comet reached profitability in 2017, just one year after it was founded. The pandemic brought its business to a halt, and activity resumed only very gradually before returning to a stable level at the end of the first quarter of 2022*. 2021 was devoted to preparing the opening of its first venues outside France, in Brussels and Madrid. The company drew on that experience to develop new offerings and help businesses adapt to new ways of organising work and to the economic pressures on office real estate. Those developments come together at Comet Bercy, the eighth site, officially opened in early November 2022 in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. The new Comet Workplaces offering brings complete, tailor-made solutions to companies that have chosen hybrid work.
The results in figures
"Ever since Comet was founded, our concern has been to commit to a model of measured growth, reconciling expansion and profitability. At the time that was an unusual choice, in a context of record fundraising for French startups, and it had the virtue of forcing us to stay focused on the value we bring to our clients. That is how we developed our new offerings, and Comet Workplaces in particular. Clients take to them very naturally, because we give them access to what they really want," explains Victor Carreau, co-founder and CEO of Comet.
Comet's growth in figures
- 2022 revenue: €27 million (10-month financial year)
- 8 venues operated directly in Paris, Madrid and Brussels
- 3 venues run as a service operator in Paris
- 545,000 visitors since 2016
- 20,000 events since 2016
- Headcount at 31 December 2022: 170 people, including 46 jobs created
Comet Meetings in Belgium
Comet Meetings celebrated its first anniversary in Brussels in December. Over that first year, Comet Meetings Louise hosted close to 1,000 events and meetings, as well as almost 20,000 participants, with the aim of offering them gatherings full of meaning and creativity. The landmark venue, designed in collaboration with Belgian architect Lionel Jadot, has also turned heads: hundreds of curious companies and entrepreneurs have come to visit it.
2023: focus on hybrid work and European expansion
While the heart of Comet's offering rests on "Meetings", its original flagship solution, the company intends to accelerate its development with "Workplaces", a new proposition designed for decision-makers' challenges around work organisation and corporate real estate. Alongside a Comet Meetings space, Comet Bercy includes a large floor devoted to the new Comet Workplaces offering. This pioneering venue, designed to encourage collaboration, hosts innovative corporate offices and lets companies pay only for the square metres they need, on highly flexible leases.
"Fully remote or fully on-site at head office are no longer models of fulfilment and performance for teams. Hybrid organisations will keep spreading to serve both goals. A company is a living thing that must constantly adapt to economic realities. Reducing office space while giving employees places dedicated to working well together is a concern for more and more decision-makers, and Comet now has a real answer for them," explains Victor Carreau, CEO of Comet.
After Brussels and Madrid, Comet will continue expanding in Europe, either by strengthening its presence in the countries where it already operates or by entering new ones. On the latter point, it is currently looking at Italy or Germany. Comet aims to open at least one new venue in Europe each year, depending on how mature the target markets are when it comes to hybrid work.
*Activity returned to 100% after the Omicron variant on 1 March 2022, giving 10 months of actual trading in the financial year.
