Christophe Garnier has spent much of his career chasing a particular kind of waste. In mobile marketing, it was the gap between a brand and the person carrying a phone. In e-commerce, it was inventory waiting for the right buyer. In coworking, it was an office with the lights on and nobody at the desk. The industries changed. The irritation stayed put: expensive capacity, already built, waiting for software to make it useful.
Today that irritation lives inside Upflex, the New York workplace technology company Garnier co-founded with Ginger Dhaliwal. The company connects employers to flexible workspaces and helps them manage how people use offices. Its proposition can sound like a booking convenience. Garnier’s longer career makes the sharper version visible. He is trying to turn corporate real estate from a fixed promise about tomorrow into a set of options for what workers actually do.
This is an unfashionably practical ambition. The office debate prefers declarations: return, resist, remote, together. Garnier’s question is closer to the finance desk. How much space is being paid for? How much is used? What happens when demand moves across a city, or across a continent, but the lease remains exactly where it was signed?
The long route to an obvious problem
Garnier grew up on the French coast and surfed. In 1999, he moved from Paris to San Francisco to help a European mobile technology company, Mobileway, expand in the United States. This was the era when a mobile phone still felt like a separate commercial frontier. He later joined Enpocket in business development, learning the mechanics of fast growth and cross-border expansion before starting mSmart in New York in 2005.
Then came Totsy, the flash-sale e-commerce company for parents that he launched with Guillaume Gauthereau in 2008. Garnier says it raised more than $30 million and created five million accounts. It also delivered the episode that follows him through nearly every substantial interview: Groupon reportedly offered $80 million to acquire the company. Investor resistance kept the deal from happening. Competition intensified. Totsy eventually sold at a loss.
At the end of the day, it’s all about resilience.Christophe Garnier, on surfing and startups
There is no tidy maxim capable of redeeming that sequence. A rejected offer is not the same thing as a mistake when the decision belongs to several people and the future remains hidden. What makes the episode useful is Garnier’s willingness to keep it in the story. He has spoken about the embarrassment of a public reversal and the difficulty of separating a founder’s identity from a company’s result. Afterward, he left the New York startup circuit for a time and went surfing.
He came back through real estate. In 2013, Garnier founded Spark Labs, a flexible workspace business and network for entrepreneurs entering the U.S. market. It helped more than 150 international companies expand in America, according to his professional profile. It also carried leases. As the American coworking market filled with well-funded operators, Garnier and Dhaliwal concluded that owning the obligation was the wrong side of the equation. The interesting asset was not the room. It was access to many rooms.
The company that lost its customers
Garnier and Dhaliwal began building Upflex in 2017 and had a minimum viable product in 2018. The first idea borrowed from membership businesses: a single employer benefit that gave workers access to coworking locations. Garnier has described it as a Gympass for workspaces. The model was simple enough to explain and difficult enough to scale. Before the pandemic, Upflex had roughly 2,000 coworking spaces on its platform and struggled to sign some of the larger brands.
In 2020, the demand side vanished. Companies did not need a distributed-office benefit when employees were staying home. A marketplace deprived of customers looks like an emergency. Upflex treated it as a supply project. Coworking operators were suddenly willing to discuss any credible route back to demand. The platform added brands and locations, moving from about 2,000 spaces to 6,000 during the pandemic, according to Garnier’s later account.
When office demand returned, it returned with different requirements. Employers were not merely shopping for a desk by the day. They were reducing permanent footprints, supporting teams spread across cities and trying to understand which spaces earned their keep. Brokers and corporate real estate firms took an interest. Upflex moved from an HR benefit sold largely to startups toward proptech sold to larger enterprises. By the end of 2022, it reported 10,000 workspace locations, 1,350 operators and customers including Schneider Electric and Willis Towers Watson.
The shift produced a useful distinction. Flexibility is not the absence of an office. It is the ability to change the office configuration without treating every change like a crisis. An employer might keep a central headquarters, add on-demand rooms for distributed workers and use data from both to make the next real estate decision. The lease becomes one instrument rather than the entire orchestra.
The reset after the round that did not arrive
Capital made the expansion possible. Upflex raised a $30 million Series A in 2022 from a group that included WeWork, Newmark and Cushman & Wakefield. Garnier later explained that the money was raised to grow, not to reach break-even. The plan assumed another round. In 2023, that Series B did not materialize.
Upflex cut its headcount by half. On a 2024 podcast, Garnier did not offer the standard polished account of disciplined efficiency. He focused on the mistake inside the decision: conducting layoffs in two waves. The second round, he said, damaged trust more than the first. The company had to repeat the facts, increase transparency and demonstrate that the new operating plan could hold.
We didn’t raise that A round to reach breakeven. We raised it to grow.Christophe Garnier, SaaS Founder Stories
The smaller Upflex stabilized and continued growing with more focus and automation. A reported $6.41 million debt financing followed in 2024. The sequence echoes Totsy without repeating it: ambitious growth, financing pressure, an unwelcome change in the plan. This time, Garnier remained with the company and described the correction while it was still recent enough to be uncomfortable.
Optionality is a product and a management habit.
Upflex sells companies alternatives to a rigid office footprint. Its own history suggests the internal version matters too: a cost base, financing plan and product model able to survive when the next round or the next customer does not arrive on schedule.
An office is a prediction
Garnier’s sustainability argument begins with reuse. Buildings consume energy whether or not every desk is occupied, and commutes impose costs that never appear on the lease. Upflex has promoted closer-to-home workspace and partnered with Trees for the Future, linking bookings to tree planting. Garnier has spoken of reaching one million trees. The claim is not that flexible space erases the footprint of work. It is that using existing capacity more intelligently should come before constructing more capacity by habit.
The product has continued moving from marketplace toward operating system. Upflex now describes tools that combine external flex inventory with the management of a company’s own offices. In March 2025, Garnier announced that the U.S. General Services Administration had selected Upflex for a pilot involving federal and commercial workspace access, alongside spatial-intelligence partner gospace AI. The public-sector setting makes the underlying question larger but no less plain: can a sprawling property portfolio behave like a responsive network?
Every office is a prediction written in drywall. It predicts headcount, attendance, geography and how much proximity a team requires. Garnier’s career has supplied repeated evidence that predictions expire. Mobile channels shifted. E-commerce economics turned. Coworking demand disappeared, then returned wearing an enterprise badge. Financing markets closed between planned rounds.
His answer has not been to stop making commitments. Upflex itself has taken capital, hired teams and pursued large customers. The more precise lesson is to place fewer irreversible bets around the commitment. Keep the mission steady - less wasted space, more useful access - while allowing the route to change.
Garnier still uses surfing as his preferred metaphor. Catching the wave is only the beginning; staying on it requires constant adjustment. It is an attractive line because it avoids the founder’s favorite fantasy of controlling the ocean. The market moves first. The operator earns another few seconds by reading it well.
For Upflex, the wave is an office market learning that occupancy is variable while rent is not. Garnier wants to close that gap with networks, software and a more candid relationship with uncertainty. The empty desk, in his telling, is not a symbol in a culture war. It is simply an invoice waiting for a better idea.