While new leasing activity for office space is still fairly quiet around downtown San Francisco, a couple of prominent companies are making moves in further positive signs of an upswing.

Tubi, the streaming platform that launched over a decade ago in San Francisco, is relocating downtown to a new office and launching a new Builders Program aimed at giving newly graduated, budding engineers and project managers a foothold in Silicon Valley.

Tubi just announced that it is opening a new headquarters this fall at 201 Third Street, on the SoMa side of downtown, consolidating its 140 core employees onto one floor. The company has been operating out of three floors at 315 Montgomery Street. As the SF Business Times notes, 201 Third Street lost a major tenant recently after Capital One relocated to 100 California late last year.

Tubi, which boasts over 100 million monthly active users and over 300,000 movies and TV episodes, is an ad-supported streaming platform that was acquired by the Fox Corporation in 2020.

The New York Times profiled the company last summer, calling Tubi "The Little Streamer That Could," and reporting how it had exploded in popularity since 2023, consistently outranking Peacock, Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV+ for total viewing time. "People love free," one analyst noted, and compared the platform to the household TV sets of previous decades that people would just leave on all day long.

The platform has a deep library of both obscure and older, popular shows, as well as a significant amount of content aimed at Black audiences — the platform boasts a 46% Black audience, far higher than the more high-profile streamers. And the Tubi audience skews older as well, with more than half over the age of 50.

Tubi has also become known for low-budget horror-comedies like The VelociPastor, and Slay, a 2024 comedy featuring Rupaul's Drag Race stars Trinity Taylor, Heidi N Closet, and Crystal Method as drag queens who battle vampires in a biker bar.

"At Tubi we’re building the future of entertainment technology and we’re excited to invest in the city of San Francisco, where our business began over a decade ago, with a new office and our Builders Program," said Mike Bidgoli, Tubi's chief product and technology officer, in a statement about the new offices. He adds that the Builders Program "reflects our belief that innovation thrives when fresh perspectives meet real opportunity."

The inaugural cohort of the 18-month program saw 11,000 applications come in from across the country, out of which 20 talented individuals were selected. Each will choose between three tracks: Associate Product Manager, Associate Software Engineer, or Associate Machine Learning Engineer.

Also in the news today, OpenAI reportedly closing in on a deal to take over 200,000 more square feet of office space in Mission Bay. As the Chronicle reports, the company is looking to take a large chunk of space at 455 Mission Bay Boulevard, a building that has largely been home to biotech companies until now.

The space is reportedly going to house OpenAI's nonprofit arm.

This would add to the 300,000 square feet of office space the company leased last year at 550 Terry Francois Boulevard, and the two buildings next to the Chase Center that it is subleasing from Uber, totaling 486,600 square feet, at 1455 and 1515 Third Street.