Our story

Good work needs a decent room

In Nigeria, far too many people doing serious work do not have one. And far too many good rooms sit empty all week. We built Circle Ground to put those two facts in the same place.

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A loft workspace in natural light with a long shared table and room to work

Why we started

Two things are true in Lagos on the same Tuesday

A lot of people here do real work with nowhere to go and do it. A consultant finishing a deck in a cafe that keeps asking whether she will order something else. A photographer shooting in a friend’s sitting room. A three person team taking a client call in a hotel lobby because there was no other option.

At the same time, meeting rooms sit locked. Studios go quiet between jobs. Whole floors stay empty while the service charge runs, the generator runs, and security still sits at the gate.

Nobody planned it this way. Space in this country is sold in years, through agents, with twelve months asked for up front. So the people who need it cannot afford it, and the people who own it cannot fill it.

Circle Ground is what happens when you stop treating that as normal.

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85.6%

of employed Nigerians work for themselves. Freelancers, consultants, creatives, artisans, small teams. Almost none of them have anywhere good to work, and almost none of them can sign a lease.

Source: National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria Labour Force Survey, Q2 2024

~27%

of prime Lagos office space sits empty, in the most expensive office market in Africa. Ikoyi is at 31.8%. Banana Island is at 41.8%. The costs run either way.

Source: Knight Frank, Africa Office Market Dashboard H2 2025; Estate Intel H1 2025

That is not a shortage of space. It is a shortage of ways to buy it in the amount people actually need.

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What we do

We make space bookable by the hour

Hosts list the space they already own and set their own rates and hours. We check every listing in person before it goes live. Guests book the hours they need and see the full price, service fee and tax included, before they pay. We hold the money until check in, and we step in when something goes wrong.

No lease. No deposit. No agent. No knowing somebody who knows somebody.

01
A host lists
Ten minutes. Any room that is empty more often than it is full.
02
We verify it
Physically checked and photographed by our team. Nothing goes live unverified.
03
Someone books
Full price up front. The payment is held until check in.
04
Everyone gets paid
The host keeps 85%. Payouts run on a schedule, tracked in the app.

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Our mission

To remove the barriers between skilled, talented professionals and smart, well equipped workplaces.

Our vision

To change how people work, by building a society where no one is limited by location, infrastructure, or access to the tools they need to do their work.

A place of work should be available to anyone ready to work, without them carrying the cost of maintaining it.
People should pay for the time and the value they actually use, not for capacity that sits idle.
Anyone with unused space should be able to earn from it, and that income should help them keep it.

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Our values

The Circle Code

Six values in two halves. How we behave with people, and how we build the thing. We tried to force them into a neat acronym. Every version bent a value out of shape to fit a letter, so we named the framework instead.

How we behave

Trust: Money, keys and reputations move through us. We earn that on every single booking.
Transparency: The full price, the real photographs, the actual instructions for getting in. No surprises at the door.
Safety: Verified hosts, verified spaces, verified guests. Nobody walks into an unknown.

How we build

Innovation: We solve for the market we are actually in, not the one in somebody else’s case study.
Equality: A barber in Yaba and a law firm in Ikoyi get the same tools and the same standing.
Excellence: If a space carries our badge, it is good. We would rather list fewer and mean it.

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Our standard

What you can hold us to

Values are easy to write. These are the six we can be measured on, and the ones we would want you to complain about if we ever missed them.

Every space is checked in personNot a photo upload. A visit, by someone on our team, before a single guest can see it.
The price on the listing is the price you payService fee and VAT included, shown before you pay, not added at the end.
Your money is held until check inIf the room is not what was listed, you are covered and we sort it out.
Hosts are paid on a scheduleEvery time, tracked in the app. No chasing anyone for money.
Hosts reply within two hoursThat is the commitment every host makes when they list with us.
Verification is cleared inside 48 hoursOn 95% of submissions. If we are slower than that, we have a problem to fix.

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Where we are going

The marketplace is the entry point

Marketplace
Host and guest services
The wider ecosystem
Infrastructure we build

Right now we connect people who need space with people who have it. That is the first thing we are doing, not the last.

Once we know which spaces get booked, where, at what price and how often, we will know exactly what is worth building. Smart offices. Pod studios. Photography studios. Community work hubs. Barbershop workspaces. Automated service spaces. Distributed across a city, reachable from a phone, and productive for the person who owns them as well as the person using them.

We are starting in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, and that is where all of our attention is for now.