We know long-term leases aren’t moving anymore, but San Francisco-based Kodi has a hotter move: It’s not coworking either. Co-founded by Christelle Rohaut and Dave Schuman, the company started in 2018 to create a more flexible office space for companies looking for personal and flexible work spaces for their employees.
Currently, the startup’s most disturbing belief is that it doesn’t fit the co-working model popularized by WeWork. Unlike WeWork, which sells desk space to employees on a shared floor, Cody thinks people want a private place to go two days a week. It is a marketplace that matches startup companies with assets that meet liquidity requirements. He then helps the onboarding process go as smoothly as possible, from design to IT, including office supplies and cleaning services.
And, like most startups, he wants to get the best of both worlds: privacy and community, flexibility and space, scale and uniqueness.
Cody announced today that it has raised a $16 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The investment happened weeks before the company invested in Flow, WeWork founder Adam Neumann next bet; Both investments reflect the company’s interest in a more volatile yet key future real estate interest.
Rohaut isn’t too worried about sharing a venture backer with a WeWork founder. A16z investment partner Jeff Jordan took a place on Codi’s board as part of the round; The New York Times reports that Marc Andreessen is joining Flow’s board. The company recently announced plans to become a “remote-first” company.
“A lot of our companies come from WeWork because they want to graduate from it,” Rohout said in an interview with TechCrunch. She says the two priorities for companies these days are first, giving them their own space to build and grow the company culture and meet their needs, and second, getting employees to go where they don’t congregate. It doesn’t require downtown and long commute time. Kodi, the co-founder says, offers the best of both worlds, the ability to work from anywhere, sometimes with the exception of a private office space.
It may be true that tech workers typically don’t want to go into an office 5 days a week, but as employers try to figure out what their new in-person needs are like, a flexible office space can introduce its own frustrations. Kodi needs to convince employers that moving to a flexible workspace managed through Kodi makes more sense than opening a small independent office.
Cody claims to have cut the time it takes to open an office from six months to four weeks. Cody can reduce the length of the lease from 36 months to six months, and offers options to extend the contract if necessary. It also provides a support team to handle all of its various services, which can save a startup tens of thousands of dollars a year.
On the real estate side, Cody owns no buildings. Instead, they partnered with building owners to create recurring revenue streams for properties, typically from long-term tenants or the entire construction phase. The co-founder declined to share details about the current customer base, but the startup has more than 100 office buildings in two regions: New York and the Bay Area.
It’s a smart sounding board with a common weight headache to consider. For example, Kodi needs to solve for short commutes where there are many, many contact points for employees, regardless of whether they are indoors. If this is the case, the office can become disorganized over time if it tries to meet the employee’s attention span. The opposite type of goals for work in the body.
There is a common misconception between what people say they want and what people actually do. If there’s one thing hybrid work has taught us, it’s that the world is constantly changing its mind. Even with a flexible lease, what happens if a startup wants to go from 2 days a week to 5 days a week? It’s not necessarily a code challenge, but it can complicate the broader vision of developing flexible and personal workspaces.
