A16z-backed Codi launches AI agent office manager

Codi, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup founded by Christelle Rohaut and Dave Schuman, is launching what it hails as the first AI-powered platform to fully automate office management.  

Codi was founded in 2018, in a pre-pandemic world, with a mission to help companies find flexible office spaces. It was more of a marketplace, as TechCrunch previously reported, that matched companies to buildings that offered flexible office arrangements. Codi then assisted with the move-in processes.

Rouhat, the company’s CEO, said she and her team back then used to manually manage office spaces and vendors for their clients, but the recent advancements in AI have allowed them to essentially automate themselves. 

“The previous model of Codi, you had to get the space with Codi. Now, whatever office you lease, you can use this to automate your office logistics,” she said of her new AI SaaS product.

The startup released its beta version of the new AI office management product in May and officially launched it on Tuesday. The company last raised a $16 million Series A in 2022 led by a16z, and has raised $23 million to date.

The technology comes as return-to-office continues to take hold throughout corporate America. “Office management remains very manual and broken,” Rouhat, the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch. She added that it can cost companies at least $80,000 a year just in administrative costs to run an office.  

The role of an office manager has also changed throughout the years. In this post-pandemic world, as companies moved toward remote and hybrid work, the formal job of office manager has often been left unfilled. When companies do have an office manager, they are often spending more time on planning events rather than the logistics of the office, she said. 

Rouhat said she and the team trained the Codi AI on all the expertise and data they’ve accumulated over the past few years. The vendors a company uses are put into the AI system, and then the AI coordinates for office needs such as pantry restocking and cleaning. The company said it took only five weeks for it to reach $100,000 in ARR after it released its beta.  

“This new platform is estimated to save hundreds of hours a year in admin tasks,” she said. Codi takes a management fee per month,  like a subscription, which is “a fraction of the cost of an office manager or part-time office manager or even a fractional EA,” Rohat continued.  

Rouhat said “a good portion” of their clients, from whom they managed office spaces, are transitioning to using the AI platform. Just in the beta, the new Codi product has already signed 40 new companies, like TaskRabbit and Northbeam, Rouhat said.  

Rouhat sees Codi’s competitors as being legacy management companies and workplace experience platforms, like Envoy. She said, unlike legacy management companies, Codi replaces the need for staff members to review, hire, and coordinate with each vendor because the execution is autonomous and the platform integrates a curated network of serviced providers, Rohaut said.

Also, compared to workplace platforms, Codi helps coordinate the handling of physical operations in an office, she continued.

“Codi is building the future where offices can run themselves, just like cars can drive themselves,” she continued. “We want to entirely remove the logistical burden of managing physical spaces and free human talent to focus on the workplace culture and growth.”