By HOJUN CHOI
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

WeWork's new location near UT Austin's North Campus, photo by Hojun Choi.

WeWork’s new location near UT Austin’s North Campus, photo by Hojun Choi.

WeWork opened its second Austin location, “WeWork University Park” on Monday.

The new space is located on the 7th floor of the University Park business center at 3300 N. Interstate 35, near the University of Texas at Austin’s North Campus area. The building also houses one of Google’s Austin offices.

Emanuel Ibarra, program coordinator for the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin told Silicon Hills News that the university is looking to work more closely with the new WeWork location.

“Right now everything is preliminary and we really have not decided on or formalized anything,” Ibarra said. “For the most part, I think their community manager is trying to figure out if there is a better way to integrate the startup community at the university into what WeWork is doing.”

In addition to all the amenities offered at WeWork’s location on Congress Avenue, the space will also provide a fitness center for its members, along with free garage parking. The new 24,747 square foot coworking space will allow WeWork to accept about 470 more members in the Austin area.

The New York-based startup opened its first Austin location in February 2015, and hosted a launch party in March during which co-founder Adam Neumann spoke favorably of Austin’s startup scene, and talked about his inspiration for being an entrepreneur.

“It’s about being a global citizen for the world,” Neumann told Silicon Hill News during the 2015 launch party.

Earlier this year in March, the Wall Street Journal reported that the short-term lease co-working space, which was founded in 2010, had reached a valuation of $16 billion.

The newest WeWork location is one of several coworking spaces to open in the Austin area lately. TechSpace and Galvanize both opened downtown locations recently. They join other coworking spaces catering to entrepreneurs downtown like Capital Factory, fibercove, Vuka, Orange Coworking and Urban Co-Lab.

Correction: this article originally stated the square footage of the new space at 24,000, but the article has been updated with the exact figure which is 24,747 square feet.