The next office revolution may arrive disguised as a request for oat milk. A message appears in Slack. Another employee needs an access badge. The kitchen sink leaks. The cleaner needs new instructions after Thursday’s event. None of these jobs looks consequential on its own. Together, they form the low, constant hum of a physical workplace - a stream of chores that someone must catch, route, schedule, pay for and remember.
Christelle Rohaut has been following that hum for years. As the co-founder and CEO of Codi, she first tried to change where people worked. Then she helped companies find and operate private offices. Now Codi is trying to change how those offices run, using an AI assistant to coordinate cleaning, pantry stock, furniture, information technology, maintenance and building requests.
The product has traveled a long way from its origin. The underlying observation has barely moved: cities contain a great deal of expensive space and human effort that is poorly matched. Rohaut’s unusual advantage is that she saw the office first as an urban planner, then as a marketplace operator, and only later as a software problem.
A question hiding in the commute
Rohaut grew up in southern France. She has described herself as an only child who wanted to know the neighbors whenever her family moved, but found that connection difficult to create. Years later, the same curiosity about the social life of a block would become part of her professional vocabulary: community, local economy, mixed use, proximity.
At École Polytechnique, she trained as an engineer with a focus on environmental science. She entered the school’s X2013 class, briefly served in the French military as part of that education, and participated in innovation competitions. Those contests, she later said, helped confirm that she enjoyed solving urban problems. In 2016 she crossed the Atlantic for a Master of City Planning at UC Berkeley, expecting the move to last two years.
California presented a visual argument. In the European cities she knew, homes, shops and offices more often shared neighborhoods. In much of the United States, commercial districts and residential districts sat apart. Each morning, people traveled from one to the other. Neighborhood homes emptied while downtown offices filled. Each evening, the flow reversed.
Rohaut was studying circular economies through a 2017 Schmidt MacArthur Fellowship, asking how local systems might share resources more effectively. She also disliked her own options for remote work. Home felt isolating. Coffee shops were noisy and unreliable. Offices and coworking spaces required the very commute that remote work was supposed to eliminate. A friend’s home felt different: nearby, comfortable, social enough, and separate from her own domestic space.
“I’ve always been obsessed with how to make cities a better place to work and live in.”Christelle Rohaut
The first Codi grew from that combination of research and irritation. The platform, initially called hīven, would turn living rooms and spare spaces into small daytime work hubs. A worker could walk down the street. A host could earn money from a home that otherwise sat empty. The coffee purchase before work could stay in the neighborhood. The ambition was more civic than a desk-booking interface suggested.
Homes become work hubs
A marketplace connects remote workers with daytime space in neighborhood homes.
Private office as a service
Codi matches companies with flexible commercial space, then handles move-in and operations.
Operations become software
An AI assistant works in any office and coordinates the vendors and tasks that keep it running.
In 2018, Codi won first place in the Connected Communities category of UC Berkeley’s Big Ideas competition. Rohaut has recalled that the award did more than provide recognition. It gave the team confidence to stop treating the concept as an academic project. She co-founded the company with Dave Schuman, an experienced technology executive who became its chief technology officer.
The early product had texture. Hosts were screened for bright, productive spaces. Some offered dog-friendly or cat-friendly days. Members could see who else had booked and meet professionals living nearby. Rohaut said reactions divided sharply: one group found the idea clever; another found working in a stranger’s home uncomfortably strange. Her job was to make the first experience dissolve that hesitation.
A shutdown and a new vacancy
Then, in 2020, gathering in other people’s homes became impossible. Codi’s locations shut. The company’s immediate market disappeared while the broader idea of flexible work accelerated by years. It was a brutal contradiction: the world suddenly agreed that work did not require a central office, but Codi could not safely deliver its physical alternative.
Rohaut did not pretend the first product remained right. She kept the urban thesis and changed the unit of supply. Commercial landlords now had vacancy. Companies wanted private space without a long lease or a shared coworking floor. By the fall of 2021, Codi was matching those companies with underused commercial offices. It furnished the rooms, connected the internet, stocked the coffee and arranged the cleaning.
This was a meaningful shift in customer, inventory and economics. It was also consistent with the original map. Empty capacity had moved from residential homes to commercial buildings. Codi followed it.
The proposition fit the uncertainty of the moment. Codi said it could cut a conventional 36-month commitment to six months and reduce an office opening from as long as six months to four weeks. Companies could have privacy and their own identity without guessing their headcount years in advance. Landlords could earn from space that was otherwise idle.
In September 2022, Codi raised a $16 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its later-reported total funding to $23 million. The firm’s Jeff Jordan joined the board. Codi said gross revenue had increased 22 times in the prior year and its client count had grown tenfold. Rohaut had also been named to Forbes’ 2021 30 Under 30 list in consumer technology.
Funding was the visible milestone. Survival was the more revealing one. Rohaut wrote that the round followed two years in which offices closed, established flexible-space companies failed, and she became a parent while her family remained on another continent. The post was candid about the strain and equally specific about the lesson: the team kept returning to the problem it meant to solve.
Learning the work before automating it
Running offices taught Codi what a leasing marketplace could not. Finding a room is episodic. Keeping it useful is continuous. A dozen minor requests can consume the day of an executive assistant, people leader or founder. Vendors operate across email, phone and text. Building rules live in documents. A pantry order that looks simple depends on preferences, budget, inventory and delivery access.
For several years, Codi’s people handled that complexity manually. They sourced cleaners, arranged furniture, followed up with landlords and learned which tasks repeated. This service layer produced something more valuable than a tidy checklist: a working model of office operations in the physical world.
Advances in AI gave Rohaut and Schuman a way to encode it. Codi released a beta office-management product in May 2025 and officially launched it that October. A company no longer had to lease its space through Codi. It could connect its existing office, vendors, lease agreement, insurance documents and building contacts. Employees could message Codi in Slack; the system could classify the request, ask questions, schedule a provider and track completion.
The move from marketplace to software matters. A marketplace grows by matching each new customer to a suitable property. Software that works inside any office can travel farther and faster. It also asks more of the product. A chatbot can say that a plumber is scheduled. A useful office manager must make sure a real plumber enters a real building at the promised time.
That is Codi’s sharpest bet. The system has to bridge language and logistics, translating “the conference room smells musty” into a completed physical action. Its advantage, if one develops, will come from the years when the company did those jobs by hand. The software is an abstraction built after the operational apprenticeship.
“We want to entirely remove the logistical burden of managing physical spaces and free human talent to focus on workplace culture and growth.”Christelle Rohaut
When the beta launched, Rohaut said 40 new companies had signed, including TaskRabbit and Northbeam, and the product reached $100,000 in annual recurring revenue within five weeks. Codi’s current site says the assistant has managed more than 220 offices and resolves 94 percent of employee requests automatically. Those are company figures, but they reveal the metric that matters now: not square feet leased, but work completed without landing in a person’s inbox.
A mission allowed to change clothes
Rohaut’s path is easy to flatten into the familiar language of pivots. That misses the precision of what stayed constant. The 2018 home marketplace, the 2021 private-office service and the 2025 AI manager are different businesses on the surface. All three try to reduce wasted capacity in the relationship among people, places and work.
Her influences make the continuity clearer. Jane Jacobs taught generations of planners to pay attention to how streets and neighborhoods actually behave. Circular-economy thinking asks what can be shared, reused and kept productive. Brian Chesky, whom Rohaut has named as a founder she admires, demonstrated how design and hospitality can make unfamiliar behavior feel normal. Codi carries a trace of each idea.
There is also a useful humility in the sequence. Rohaut did not begin by declaring office management an AI category. Her team first accumulated the inconvenient knowledge: which cleaner shows up, which delivery needs a certificate of insurance, which broken chair should be replaced, and how many cases of sparkling water a team actually drinks. The newer product exists because the earlier one exposed the work.
The city-scale dream remains visible, even in the small chores. Rohaut still talks about offices as votes for neighborhoods and local economies. She still wants work to fit more naturally into life. Codi’s interface may now live in Slack, but its final output is physical: a room that functions, a team that can gather, a person whose attention is returned.
An office that runs itself is a bold image. In practice, it will be proven quietly. The coffee arrives. The badge works. The sink stops leaking. Nobody has to ask twice. For a founder who began by noticing what sat empty and who traveled unnecessarily, that quiet is a form of urban order.