Venia Hub is the swanky coworking and shared-office space in Lekki, Lagos. They’ve been around for a while serving tech startups and established legacy businesses, but they are getting an upgrade.
After four years of operation, the management is increasing the capacity of the hub (from 32 to 120 businesses). It is moving to opening a second hub at a more accessible part of Lekki Phase 1, according to Venia Group CEO, Kola Oyeneyin.
Basically, there will now be two Venia hubs in Lekki. The second hub is called Hub 2.0.
But the most exciting part for us is the bit about faster downloads. Extensive fibre cabling has been going on in Lekki Phase 1 and one of the upgrades that comes with the Venia Hub 2.0 is fibre-to-the-premises. Cools.
“Venia Hub 2 is taking advantage of the recently deployed fibre cable in Lekki Phase 1 to ensure that our members experience true broadband. Now it’s not only fast, it is fibre!” the project lead at Venia 2.0, Geraldine Ekpo told TechCabal.
She told us Venia Hub 2.0 will also be deploying advanced multimedia technologies like the Grandstream GVC3200 Full HD and the latest Smart TV technology with an Oracle PaaS Solution (Platform as a Service) for developers who are interested in cloud-based App Dev platforms.
This looks good, but it appears the pricing as we’ve known it won’t be getting a shave.
“Cheap in Nigeria doesn’t always give you what you pay for. The one thing you can be sure of at Venia is that you get more than you pay for. It is not cheap but we’ve subsidised it for all,” Geraldine told us.
But it’s exciting still. If Venia delivers on the premium services promised, it’s definitely value for money. The hub opens at a new location off Admiralty Way on December 1.
Here are some 3D renderings of the new hub.
[Update]: An earlier version of the article claimed that Venia hub was moving from its present location. Venia informed us that the new hub is only an expansion. The old Venia hub is still operational.
