A swipe, a match, a company. CoffeeSpace took the most nerve-wracking question in startup life - who will build this with me? - and turned it into something you do with your thumb on a Tuesday night.
Somewhere right now, a product designer in Lagos is reading the profile of an engineer in Lisbon. They have never met. In ninety seconds they will know whether they want the same thing - the same equity split, the same hours, the same impossible ambition. That meeting used to take a conference, a warm intro, and a year of luck. On CoffeeSpace it takes a swipe.
CoffeeSpace is a mobile app that matches people who want to build companies together. Think of the mechanics of a dating app, pointed at the most consequential professional relationship most founders will ever have. Founders look for cofounders. Talent looks for startups worth joining. Startups look for the first few people crazy enough to say yes. The app sits in the middle, doing the introductions - and it is rather good at it.
The pitch is almost cheeky in its simplicity. Dating apps made it normal to meet a stranger and fall in love. CoffeeSpace wagers the same trick works for the other lifelong partnership - the one with a cap table.
We believe CoffeeSpace will change the nature of how people find business partners, just like what Tinder did for online dating ten years ago.
CoffeeSpace was born from a number that bothered Hazim Mohamad: most people with a business idea never act on it. Dig into why, and the reasons rhyme - missing skills, feeling overwhelmed, no time, no resources. Five of the six biggest barriers point to the same hole in the boat. There was no one to build with.
*Share of CoffeeSpace talent reaching an interview after matching. Figures per CoffeeSpace and public interviews.
CoffeeSpace is not one experience pretending to serve everyone. It splits into three pathways, each tuned to what you came for.
Filter by expertise, location, industry, time commitment, and equity preferences. Matches only happen when both sides clear each other's bar - dual-sided compatibility, no one-way crushes.
Skip the cold application. Profiles surface real projects and execution, not just a resume, and matching weighs ambition and working style. Average time to first match: about 72 hours.
Reach builders who actually want the early-stage chaos. High-signal matching is optimised for relevance over reach, with transparent feedback on where things stand.
You build a profile that blends public signal (think LinkedIn-style data) with private preferences you would never put on a public page - how much time you can give, what equity feels fair, the kind of person you actually like working with at 2am. The algorithm evaluates skills, experience, ambition and working style, then only introduces people who fit both ways. Then it gets out of the way and lets two humans talk.
It is a freemium model: free for founders and talent with a cap on monthly matches, with premium tiers unlocking more matches and sharper filters. There was even a stretch when the plans were named like airline cabins - Economy, Business Class, First Class. The product has a sense of humour about itself, which is rarer than it should be.
There is a pleasing recursion here: CoffeeSpace was built by a cofounding team that came together remotely, across continents, mirroring the very thing the product does. Hazim - an MIT finance grad who passed through the World Bank before the startup bug won - had carried the idea for two years before Carin's out-of-the-blue message turned it into a company.
You can do a lot with little resources. Talk to users. Build the product.
Before a single line of code, the team validated demand the old-fashioned way - a Google Form and a pile of LinkedIn messages. Fifteen people paid before there was an app to pay for. The cold-start problem that kills most marketplaces got solved with a closed beta and a thousand users in the first month.
CoffeeSpace launches on iOS and Android after a closed beta - and crosses 1,000 users in its first month.
Featured by TechCrunch; exhibits at Startup Battlefield 200, TechCrunch Disrupt. Reports 7,000+ users and 270,000+ swipes.
Closes $1M in pre-seed/seed funding, including a $500K upsize, backed by exited founders and angels from Google, Meta and QuantumBlack.
30,000+ users across 100+ countries, 65,000+ profiles, 2.5M+ swipes - and real companies, like AI travel startup Akoya, born from a single match.
Founder interviews and the app itself - the fastest way to understand the swipe-to-build idea is to watch a founder explain it, then go make a profile.
The designer in Lagos and the engineer in Lisbon? They matched. Tomorrow they will argue about a logo, a name, a roadmap. In a year they might have customers, or they might have a story about the time they tried. Either way, they got to the starting line - which is the part 90% of people never reach.
That is the quiet thing CoffeeSpace changed. It did not promise to make anyone a great founder. It just removed the excuse that you could not find anyone to start with. The conference, the warm intro, the year of luck - compressed into a swipe. The midnight that used to end in "maybe someday" now ends in a conversation. And occasionally, a company.