The Coven Built a Women-First Coworking Space That Became a Digital Platform

01 /The Concept

The Coven started as two co-working spaces – one in Minneapolis, one in neighboring St. Paul – open exclusively to women, transgender individuals, and non-binary people. That origin story matters because it explains the platform's unusual stickiness: the community was built around physical presence before it ever became a digital product.

Today The Coven operates in a hybrid format. The digital layer includes a social network where members can find collaborators, mentors, and peers, plus a library of online courses covering business building, leadership, and communication skills. Events run twice a week and can be attended either online or in person at the co-working space, with limited in-person capacity that creates a sense of access value.

Membership comes in two tiers. Digital membership ($95/month or $1,000/year) includes the social network, courses, and a 15% discount on co-working days. Hybrid membership starts at $225/month or $2,200/year for unlimited co-working access; an entry tier at $95/month adds two free visits per month and a 35% discount on additional visits. Corporate rates are available separately. Drop-in passes can also be purchased in bundles from three visits at $95 to ten visits at $250.

The Coven has now launched a franchise model, with a $50,000 entry fee, approximately $150,000 in co-working fit-out costs, and a 10% revenue share. Several cities are reportedly in preparation.

The pandemic tested the business hard – co-working visits dropped to near zero – but the core member base continued paying, choosing to support the community rather than cancel. That period also produced the digital membership tier. Post-pandemic, revenue grew fivefold in a year, driven largely by companies starting to pay for their female employees' memberships as a benefit. The company has now raised $3.28 million to accelerate expansion, following earlier rounds that totaled only a few hundred thousand dollars – which means the business was largely self-sustaining from early on.

02 /Why It Matters

The more interesting observation here is not The Coven itself but the pattern it sits within. Women-specific platforms are attracting serious capital at scale.

Chief, a [related community](/review/klub-na-milliard) for women executives, raised $100 million in a single round and reached a $1.1 billion valuation, with total funding reaching $140 million. It runs a similar hybrid model – digital network, events, and exclusive physical spaces for in-person meetings.

Other funded examples in the category include Code First Girls (coding education for women, £4.5M raised), Ellevest (investment platform for women, $153M raised), FinMarie (financial platform by and for women, €1.4M raised), and Dear Media (women-hosted podcast studio, $12.7M raised).

The pattern suggests that "women's product" is not a niche – it is half the population with specific preferences for community and context that mainstream platforms do not serve well. The capital flowing into this space reflects a market signal, not a social one: these businesses work.

What The Coven also demonstrates is that digital-only community has become harder to sustain on its own. As remote work normalized, the scarcity of in-person interaction increased its value. Hybrid models – where digital provides accessibility and the physical layer provides depth – appear to be more defensible than pure-digital alternatives.

03 /Opportunities

The opportunity is not to replicate The Coven's specific topic focus – women's place in society and the workplace – but to apply the community architecture to a wide range of subjects that are currently sold to undifferentiated audiences.

Any topic with an active training market – marketplace selling, financial literacy, coding, content creation – can be repositioned as a women-focused offering with a community layer. The core positioning ("this is the place to explore this topic with other women") becomes the differentiator against generic platforms, not the subject matter itself.

Each topic then becomes a separate product that can be sold as an add-on to the existing member base, and can also attract new members who came for that topic but can be offered others. The community is the distribution channel; the topics are the product catalog.

The strategic trap to avoid is locking the community into a single topic. The Coven's model works precisely because it can expand. A community that has established trust and retention with a specific audience can monetize that relationship across multiple verticals – which means the community itself appreciates in value as it grows, rather than hitting a ceiling when its founding topic saturates.