The first promise was almost impolite in its cleverness. Walk into a conference room and the room would notice. No wrestling with a calendar, no paper sign taped to the glass, no territorial squabble conducted in the dialect of Outlook. A tiny Bluetooth beacon would register your arrival; software would handle the bureaucracy. The room, at last, would have manners.
Brian Muse helped build that promise into Robin, the Boston workplace-software company he co-founded in 2014. He was a computer engineer with an agency behind him and an instinct for making the physical world answer to code. For more than a decade, his subject has been the office: its rooms, desks, visitors, calendars, maps and persistent human talent for being somewhere other than the place a system says they are.
Then came 2020. The rooms were still available. The people were not.
For a company built around the choreography of shared space, the pandemic was not a bad quarter or a temporary product lull. It was a philosophical ambush. Robin's software had been designed to remove friction from going to work. Overnight, going to work no longer required going anywhere. In an interview years later, Muse described the period as the moment the old business model became obsolete. It is difficult to improve the traffic flow through an empty building.
“RTO and hybrid workplaces create immense challenges that technology is uniquely suited to solve.”Brian Muse, 2021
Before the bird, there was a roar
Robin did not begin with a pristine pitch deck. It came out of One Mighty Roar, the digital agency Muse built with Sam and Zach Dunn and other partners while the founders were still close to college. The agency was profitable, employed about 15 people by 2014, and made technology-led experiences for brands including Budweiser, Facebook and Chipotle. Its makers enjoyed testing products of their own, which is a civilized way of saying that client work financed a laboratory.
Muse had graduated from Tufts University in 2009 with a degree in computer engineering. His public biography also records work connected to NASA and education technology, as well as a spell as web manager at Rediker Software. Yet the agency supplied the decisive training: not merely writing software, but joining software to people moving through real places.
At events, One Mighty Roar experimented with RFID wristbands that linked a guest's physical presence to a digital account. A swipe could activate a photo booth or register an interaction. When Bluetooth Low Energy arrived, the team saw a route away from disposable wristbands and toward a software layer for buildings. Robin's early idea was presence itself. A person entered a zone; the zone responded.
There had been other experiments. Muse's LinkedIn profile describes a side-project game called You Rather, relaunched in 2012 across the web, iOS and Android. Its questions were simple, its interfaces deliberately spare, and its community did the rest. Muse reported nearly half a million installations and millions of daily page views. It was a useful rehearsal in removing everything between a user and a choice.
Robin applied the same instinct to the minor constitutional crises of office life. Who has the room? Is the meeting actually happening? Where can a team sit together? The original magic was automatic room booking. The lasting work became a system for rooms, desks, guests, maps and the data hiding beneath them.
A startup meets the empty building
Money marked the stages. Robin announced a $7 million Series A in 2016 and a $20 million Series B in 2019. By then its ambition had expanded beyond conference-room calendars. The company was selling a broader workplace platform, the sort of software that can sound dull until you have spent 20 minutes looking for a chair with a functioning monitor.
The pandemic supplied both catastrophe and product discovery. Companies that once assigned one person to one desk suddenly had employees arriving on different days, in different combinations, with uncertain demand. Fewer people came in, but coordination became harder. A half-empty office can be more complicated than a full one because availability no longer implies usefulness. A desk on the wrong day is furniture. A room without the right colleagues is an expensive box.
Robin shifted toward that irregular world. The platform helped employees decide when to come in, reserve places to work and find the people they hoped to see. Workplace teams gained utilization data for planning space. In 2022, the company closed a $30 million Series C led by Tola Capital. Public reporting put its total raised above $59 million. The office had returned, but as a choice requiring orchestration rather than a daily certainty.
Muse's language changed with the problem. In 2021 he warned against installing technology for its own sake; the organization needed a coherent employee-experience strategy first. By 2023, he was writing about a move from resource booking to resource automation. Software should do more than record a request. It should use patterns in space, time and preference to reduce the number of requests a person must make at all.
The beautiful mess
The modern office, Muse has said, is “a beautiful mess of systems.” The beauty is that buildings can now respond to flexible work. The mess is that workplace teams count attendance and bookings, IT watches uptime and tickets, security governs access, facilities manages space, and each group can emerge from the same week holding a different version of reality.
This is where his engineering role becomes organizational. Robin says Muse oversees its long-term technology vision along with engineering and security. The product sits between digital calendars and locked doors, employee preferences and real-estate costs. It must be pleasant enough for someone booking a desk on a phone and rigorous enough for an enterprise handing over workplace data. Robin added ISO 27001 and SOC 2 credentials; Muse has argued that data protection should be a baseline expectation, not an ornamental badge.
That admission is more revealing than the usual leadership varnish. After ten years, Muse did not announce that he had eliminated emotion. He described a system for living with it. The engineer debugged his own response loop: identify the latency, add calmer collaborators, wait for the process to finish.
It also hints at why Robin could accept a chief executive from outside the founding group. Micah Remley took the CEO role in 2022, while Muse remained CTO and co-founder. Companies outgrow founding arrangements just as products outgrow first features. The trick is not to preserve every early habit. It is to preserve the useful obsession.
Build the argument
Muse's newest obsession is the way AI changes engineering itself. He expects smaller teams, faster decisions and agents that take on more coding, review, bug triage and issue resolution. His phrase “hackathon-driven development” proposes a blunt alternative to weeks of speculative documents: build an end-to-end version in a day, treat the working prototype as the specification, then use agents to help productionize it.
There are obvious dangers in speed, and Muse's public arguments have drawn pushback. A prototype can conceal bad architecture as efficiently as a document can conceal bad thinking. Yet his point is not that correctness has become optional. He continues to emphasize tests, clean contracts, explicit types and documentation. The change is in the reader. Software was traditionally written for the end user and the next human engineer. If an agent increasingly performs the maintenance, code may need to be legible to a different kind of colleague.
“Code has to be maintainable by whoever maintains it.”Brian Muse, on engineering for agents and humans
There is a neat symmetry here. Muse began by making buildings machine-readable: a beacon identifies a room, a calendar exposes intent, an occupancy signal reveals what actually happened. Now he is considering how to make software more readable to machines. In both cases, the promise is automation. In both cases, the awkward part is the human being who changes plans, ignores the sign, books the room and fails to arrive.
Robin's story does not offer the cheap comfort of a straight line. It is an agency that became a product company, a smart-building idea that became scheduling software, and an office business forced to prosper in the age of not always going to the office. Muse's work survives because the underlying problem keeps its sense of humor. People remain difficult to coordinate. Rooms remain easy to misunderstand. Calendars remain works of optimistic fiction.
The room that notices you was a charming beginning. The harder task is building a system that notices the world has changed.