The first customer arrived before Cody Candee had settled on a price. He and his co-founder had assembled a basic website in a few hours, bought Google ads, and offered to collect people’s bags in New York. Within minutes, someone called. Candee muted the phone to consult his partner. A promising business opportunity had presented itself in the slightly inconvenient form of a person expecting an answer.
The founders had Citi Bike memberships. They could go and get the luggage themselves. So they did. Before Bounce became a network of neighborhood shops and hotels, its founders put themselves between the advertisement and the customer, doing the work their website promised. The experiment had a useful lack of dignity: there was nowhere for an assumption to hide when somebody was waiting for you and their bag.
Candee would later write that he personally handled the first orders and signed up the first partner stores. Getting close to the customer gave him something to adjust. Each booking made the problem more concrete. A service that sounded plausible on a landing page had to survive the pavement.
The appeal before the application
Years earlier, Candee had already learned to ask for another look. The University of Wisconsin-Madison initially declined his application. He appealed and became the last student admitted to the freshman class of 2007. In his first year, he earned close to a 4.0 grade point average. A closed door had become a fairly demanding invitation to prove himself.
He graduated with a business degree in 2011. By 2019, the Wisconsin School of Business had included him among its “8 to Watch.” There is a pleasing economy to that sequence: an institution that once needed persuading now had an alumnus worth pointing out. Candee credited the admissions experience with teaching him persistence. He had been given a chance and had understood the terms.
His fraternity recognized him too. Delta Sigma Pi named him its 2012 National Collegian of the Year. Its later account of Bounce described two founders working from a New York living room. The distance between those scenes is less mysterious when you consider his favored instruction: “Have a bias for action.”
A traveler with fewer things
Candee’s relationship with possessions became unusually portable. In a 2021 conversation, he described a life that had taken him through more than 60 countries and 49 American states. His belongings fit into a couple of suitcases. He enjoyed rock climbing, read widely, and named The Alchemist as a favorite book. For someone building a storage company, he had remarkably little inventory of his own.
Travel also gave him places he cared about. Bangalore, where he had lived, remained a favorite. He spoke of returning to its streets and local culture with affection. His journeys around Southeast Asia helped him think about the difficulties travelers encountered. Luggage was one of those persistent, unglamorous constraints: present at exactly the moment a person wanted to go somewhere.
Then there was the evening with colleagues in San Francisco. One colleague intended to join after-work drinks but first needed to take a laptop backpack home. The errand meant roughly half an hour each way. An hour of the evening had been assigned to a bag. Candee saw wasted time and money in a routine everyone else could easily have accepted.
The observation reaches beyond holidays. A backpack can decide whether you stay out after work. A suitcase can determine which streets you explore before departure. Candee’s subject was the small surrender of choice that comes with carrying things. He had traveled enough to recognize how often it happened.
Learning at the counter
His professional training gave that irritation a method. Candee began his career in product management at Intuit. He later worked at venture studio FactoryX, where rapid prototyping helped shape his approach to testing ideas. The important work was finding out what people would actually use, with enough room left to change direction.
He and Aleksander Rendtslev began building Bounce in October 2017. The company is commonly dated to 2018; its Product Hunt launch followed in February 2019. Those milestones describe different stages of the same effort. The earliest stage involved trying a service, taking orders, and discovering which parts could become repeatable.
The partner model supplied an answer: existing businesses could hold bags in space they already had. Travelers could leave their belongings nearby. The business received payment and another person through the door. Candee’s job included persuading an owner that a stranger’s suitcase might be a sensible addition to the day’s trade.
One prospect was a sandwich-shop owner sitting in a van across the street, on the phone with his feet on the dashboard. Candee hesitated, went back inside the shop, and was encouraged to try again. He knocked on the window. The owner eventually agreed to become a partner, then suggested Candee speak to his son, whose entrepreneurial enthusiasm apparently required attention. A sales call had acquired an unsolicited family assignment.
Another relationship began with a customer. Nikhil Raj used Bounce in New York, liked it, and contacted Candee on LinkedIn. They met for coffee in San Francisco. Raj invested, then helped with introductions, including one to Vijay Ullal. The product had given a future backer a reason to start the conversation.
“I actually really love the variety of it.”
Cody Candee, on the founder’s job
The office gets an ocean
Growth made the work less dependent on what Candee could personally carry. In 2021, he described the company’s expansion across the United States, followed by Europe, Australia, and part of Asia. Customers wanted Bounce in more places. Meeting that request meant finding businesses and people who could make it work locally.
Lisbon became an operating base for engineering, product, and operations. Candee was careful about the distinction: opening those functions in Portugal was an expansion, rather than a wholesale relocation. He pointed to the city’s talent and startup environment, and to Europe’s density of urban destinations. A travel marketplace had good reasons to spend time where the travelers were.
The management problem changed with the geography. In his own writing, Candee emphasized defining the company’s values, recognizing colleagues who demonstrated them, and giving people enough information to make decisions. He argued for sharing financial runway and challenges with employees. He also cautioned against filling a vacancy in a rush when the person was a poor fit.
These are declarations about how he wants the company to operate, and they reveal his priorities. Autonomy requires context. Hiring affects the work of everyone already there. A founder cannot remain the answer to every question once teams are separated by departments and time zones. The living room eventually has to give way to an organization.
A network learns to listen
Candee has described a small experiment that captures his interest in marketplace behavior. Bounce wanted better customer reviews of its partner stores. The team began sending each store a weekly digest of its reviews and average rating. There was no instruction to improve. Candee reported that ratings rose after the information began arriving.
It is a revealing choice of intervention. People behind the counter could see the results of their work. The company changed what they knew before prescribing what they should do. For Candee, building a marketplace includes designing the conditions under which other people make decisions.
Bounce’s November 2024 Series B, led by Sapphire Sport.
That Series B brought another stage of investment into the company. Earlier, Candee had pitched Bounce on The Pitch, securing backing from investors including Jillian Manus and Michael Hyatt. The public pitch and the customer who became an angel offered different routes to the same requirement: finding people willing to finance the next period of work.
The money made the company bigger. The core transaction remained almost stubbornly physical. A person arrives at a business, leaves something important, and expects to get it back. Software has to support that understanding across thousands of counters. Every new location adds another place where the promise must be kept.
The bag finds Airbnb
In February 2026, Bounce acquired European rival Nannybag for an undisclosed amount. The deal strengthened its presence in France and Italy and added relationships with partners including Carrefour France and Fermopoint. Nannybag retained its brand. Candee described Europe as Bounce’s largest market and put the combined network at 33,000 locations in his announcement.
In May, Airbnb announced access to Bounce luggage storage as part of its product release. Guests could find nearby drop-off locations and see their distance from a listing. By August, Airbnb reported more than 24,600 drop-off points across more than 800 cities within the partnership. Those figures describe that particular channel, rather than Bounce’s entire network.
The connection has an appealing history. In an early interview, Candee had admired Airbnb’s work on making strangers comfortable with an unfamiliar arrangement. Bounce faced its own version of that challenge. Now the accommodation platform was helping guests find somewhere to leave their bags.
Candee’s larger ambition is to make storing and accessing belongings feel as available as accessing digital files. That remains a vision measured in years. Its practical test is easier to picture: a traveler closes the door on a room, finds a place for a suitcase, and heads back into the city. There is still time before the train. For once, the bag has no plans.