On Monday, VentureBeat reported that NYC-based coworking company WeWork raised $6.85 million to expand their operations and open new spaces in San Francisco and Israel. 

This, along with the recent funding of General Assembly by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and others, signals the beginning of the coming of age for coworking.

This moment has been coming for a long time.  Coworking has been gaining steam as a grassroots movement for years, in the U.S. as well as in Europe.  Spaces like New Work City in NYC, and faberNovel's pariSoma in SF (recently named best co-working space of 2011 in San Francisco) have been figuring out how to make coworking really work for people.

And now, it is beginning to round the corner and become something that businesses and investors sit up and take notice of.

And they should take notice: traditional office spaces have been making less and less sense ever since people switched from big desks with huge stacks of paper in them to laptops that plug into the cloud and can go anywhere.  Why do you need a huge, bricks-and-mortar perma-space if your entire business is on a laptop or in the cloud?  That seems to have more drawbacks than advantages.

Some amount of re-thinking for work spaces is in order for just about everyone in the world today.

Expect this trend to continue, and to play out for years to come.  The coworking wave is really only beginning to crest.