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Peerspace Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

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The profile

The venue-booking marketplace laid off most of its staff in March 2020, then took a $1,502,007 PPP loan, of which $528,788.42 was forgiven.

  • Category: events, venues, and creator marketplaces
  • Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
  • Last updated: 2026-09-29

Pandemic-role map

  • Reader shorthand: venue-booking marketplace that laid off most of its staff in March 2020, took a $1.5 million PPP loan less than a month later, and had about a third of it forgiven.
  • What Peerspace did for customers: ran a marketplace for booking spaces for events and meetings.
  • What broke in the pandemic: social distancing; bookings slowed and cancellations rose.
  • Relief role: PPP borrower, $1,502,007.

Before the pandemic

Peerspace, a San Francisco company that says it launched its venue marketplace in 2014, raised a $16 million Series B round led by GV, Alphabet's venture arm, in July 2018; Global Venturing reported that the round brought its total funding to almost $34 million and put GV's Joe Kraus on its board. The company's Form D for the round lists $15.3 million sold to 12 investors, with Raymond Chammas and Eric Shoup as executive officers and directors. Shoup was chief executive until 2024.

What the pandemic changed

In the last week of March 2020 Peerspace laid off "a majority of their staff," more than 40 people, Layoffs.fyi reported on March 31, as bookings slowed and cancellations rose.

On April 15, 2020, SBA approved a Paycheck Protection Program loan of $1,502,007 to Peerspace, Inc., according to SBA's loan-level data, which list the originating lender as Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, N.A. and the servicing lender as First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company. The loan record reports 28 jobs.

The data show $528,788.42 forgiven on June 15, 2021, about 35% of the loan, and the loan's status as "Paid in Full." The data do not itemize the rest. Since the loan is marked paid in full and $528,788.42 of it was forgiven, the remaining principal, about $973,000, was repaid.

After the first shock

Peerspace says it came out of the pandemic larger. Its May 2024 announcement of a new chief executive credits Shoup with "growing revenues by 800% while navigating the pandemic-era lockdowns, and achieving profitability," and with expanding the marketplace "into six new countries." The company does not publish financial statements, so those figures are its own.

Where the company is now

Kevin Yuann, a former NerdWallet executive, succeeded Shoup as chief executive in 2024. Peerspace says it lists more than 45,000 venues in seven countries on three continents and has passed one million bookings and half a billion dollars in sales through the platform.

Sources

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