Super-digital UK outfit HOKO – the self-styled ‘Uber for architecture’ – has launched a £500,000 crowdfunding campaign as it bids to become a global AJ100 practice.

The company has offered up equity stakes to the public with inducements ranging from branded T-shirts to ‘the world’s most expensive brick’ to fund an ‘aggressive expansion plan’.

Founded in 2019 by 30-year-old Glasgow-based architect and entrepreneur Danny Campbell, the company aims to open 30 new studios as part of a drive to become ‘the UK’s largest homeowner architect’.

HOKO has ambitiously predicted its turnover, currently at £1.4 million, will exceed £50 million by 2025. It has also announced that its first international studio will be built in Dublin and that it plans to take its ‘full project service model to the USA next’.

Billed as a ‘one-stop-shop’ for domestic design, the company says it wants to become a global household name within the next five years and an AJ100 top-ranked firm by 2022.

Campbell claimed the number of projects on HOKO’s books had risen 970 per cent to nearly 400 in the last calendar year as interest in home improvements and extensions surged during lockdown.

Now he wants the public’s backing for his growth plans, launching a crowdfunding campaign on 30 September to give anyone ‘the chance to own part of the burgeoning business’s future’.

Campbell, a Glasgow School of Art graduate who trained at De Montfort University, said: ‘The HOKO mission has always been to provide the perfect home remodelling experience for homeowners. Now the business can be owned by the same homeowners that are at the heart of it.

‘We’re still at a really exciting stage for investors. We are small enough that personal investment will capitalise on our biggest growth phase.’

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