An artificial intelligence-powered tech company is moving into a larger office space in San Francisco.
Zip, an AI-powered procurement platform co-founded by Airbnb veterans Rujul Zaparde and Lu Cheng, is moving into a 75,000-square-foot portion of a 250,000-square-foot space formerly occupied by Macy’s offices in the Financial District, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The new space at 680 Folsom Street, which once housed Macys.com operations, in the Yerba Buena district of South of Market represents a quadrupling of its current digs at 1 Sansome Street. Over the past year, Zip has doubled its headcount to 500 employees, according to Zaparde.
“We’re hiring well north of 100 folks a quarter,” Zaparde told the Chronicle. “It was clear to us that we were outgrowing the office space that we had in FiDi and it made sense to move.” SoMa’s “very attractive” rental rates drew the firm to the neighborhood, Zaparde noted. “That was, of course, a consideration for us,” he said.
SoMa’s Yerba Buena neighborhood has seen an influx of AI-driven companies over the past year.
That includes Harvey AI, a generative AI platform focused on the legal industry, which recently agreed to lease more than 90,000 square feet at 201 3rd Street; Momentic AI, which moved into 650 5th Street; Bedrock Robotics, now occupying offices at 703 Market Street; Verana Health at 360 Third Street; and LlamaIndex at 325 Fifth Street. Other AI-powered neighbors include Anaplan and Benchling.
The AI job market is predicted to revitalize San Francisco over the next five years, according to CBRE.
AI companies could expand into as much as 21 million square feet of office space by 2030, representing a quadrupling of the current footprint of 5 million square feet across the city. Last summer, AI firms occupied 1.7 million square feet in San Francisco.
As the firms continue to grow, San Francisco could see 50,000 to 60,000 new employees in the industry by the next decade, CBRE foresees.
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