Technology Spotlight: A Conversation with Bright Spaces

Bright Spaces began in Bucharest, inside a proptech hackathon that CEO Bogdan Nicoară and his team joined with little expectation. A question was posed “How would you digitise the leasing process for short-term spaces in shopping malls?” and this became the spark for the team to build a prototype. What started as a simple challenge quickly turned into a defining moment. Their prototype didn’t just win its category. It won the entire event, catching the attention of judges from JLL, CBRE and some of Europe’s most influential developers.

Bogdan explains, “We were simply Bright Agency back then, a software company that needed a name for the hackathon, and so Bright Spaces was born.” That unexpected win became the catalyst for the startup. Bogdan returned home and told his partner: “This is it. Real estate is the world’s biggest asset class. It’s under-digitised. And the window for change is open.” Bogdan and his co-founder sold their software agency, used the capital as their first investment round and commit fully to digitising one of the world’s most traditional industries.

Building Through Uncertainty

Bright Spaces entered the market at a time of enormous promise. Then COVID arrived.

“It was a paradox,” Bogdan says. “The market was more open to digital solutions, but budgets froze.”

Yet despite the chaos, one thing became clear. Owners and brokers needed a better way to visualise, plan, and present office space. The team pivoted away from retail and office leasing became their focus. This decision, paired with an early breakthrough acceptance into Pi Labs’ accelerator in London, set the company on it’s current path.

What Bright Spaces Does

At its core, Bright Spaces is a visual leasing platform for office owners, consultants and design-and-build firms. It helps them present, configure, and sell future workplaces with clarity and speed.

Bogdan explains, “We are a sales tool, helping clients close deals up to five times faster.”
Users can take a vacant office, a floor plan, or a yet-to-exist concept and instantly turn it into a highly customisable 3D environment. They can edit layouts, showcase design options, and deliver architectural-level visual outputs without needing technical knowledge. That ease of use is deliberate.

Interestingly, many people in commercial real estate have operated the same way for decades. However, they rely on PDFs and on visuals that feel familiar. They don’t want to be taught complex systems. Bogdan calls this the “complexity tax” that the industry has been forced to pay. Explaining that “Proptech has often expected users to change their behaviour, but that doesn’t work. Our job is to remove complexity entirely.”

Bright Spaces can generate interactive PDFs that drop users straight into a 3D environment. Instead of heavy onboarding, the platform fits into workflows people already recognise.

“We’re a business partner, not a technology vendor.” he says. “And we don’t want to be anything else.”

A Global Footprint

Bright Spaces has now been deployed in twenty-four countries. From Europe to North America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, the platform’s reach mirrors the global footprints of its tier-one clients.

“Deployment can happen anywhere.” Bogdan shares. “We don’t need a local presence because our clients scale us into their portfolios.”

What Makes Bright Spaces Stand Out

The Proptech market has become crowded, with thousands of tools and thousands of pilots. Even so, Bright Spaces has carved out a distinctive position. Their first advantage is output quality. The detail and customisability of their visuals surpass anything else in the category.

Their second advantage is usability. A leasing manager can operate the platform without any training, which immediately reduces onboarding time and effort.

The third is the team’s deliberate refusal to burden clients with unnecessary complexity. Bogdan highlights, “It’s not about adding features, it’s about eliminating friction.”

Looking Ahead

Bright Spaces has intentionally built from output backwards, choosing to perfect the final experience before automating the processes behind it. Instead of rushing into efficiency at the expense of quality, the team focused on crafting a best-in-class product and only now are they streamlining what happens underneath.

The next phase is ambitious. “We’ll be the first company to deploy conversational space planning,” Bogdan says, a direction that sounds simple in theory yet has the potential to be transformative in practice. You upload a floor plan, ask the Bright Spaces agent to generate a layout, then adjust it conversationally. You can swap zones, tailor spaces for hybrid teams or build variants for different client types, all in seconds and all while staying compliant, aesthetic and functional.

This isn’t just for offices. It’s designed for the future of mixed-use buildings where retail, coworking, restaurants, hotels, vertical storage and even data centres can coexist under one roof. Real estate is shifting, and repurposing and refurbishment are set to define the next decade. Bright Spaces wants to be the tool that pulls the sector into that future.

Building the Team

When asked about scaling teams, Bogdan distilled his answer into three essentials: vision, strategy, and planning. He explained that you need all three, along with people who think differently from one another yet can still work together. The balance between visionaries, strategists, and planners is delicate. It shifts with every funding round and so requires constant recalibration.

For Bogdan, culture isn’t defined by leadership speeches. “It’s what happens when the founders aren’t in the room.” That idea shapes every hire the company makes.

Bright Spaces Today

From a hackathon to a globally deployed platform, Bright Spaces has come a long way, yet the company now stands on the edge of another major leap. Fully automated workflows, conversational planning and a reshaping of how spaces are imagined and sold are all within reach.

What stands out most is not the technology but the clarity of intent. Bright Spaces isn’t trying to add noise to an already crowded sector; it’s cutting through it. And as the industry moves toward a more flexible, multi-use, sustainability-driven era, the company looks ready not just to keep pace but to lead.

I am looking forward to seeing where Bogdan and the team take Bright Spaces next.

If you would like to discuss any of the topics raised in this piece, or if you need support with your leadership resourcing strategy, please get in touch with Emma Callahan on: emma.callahan@beaumontbailey.com.