Café

Café is a French software company offering a workplace engagement platform for hybrid organizations. Rather than functioning as a conventional desk-booking tool, the product centers on people: employees share their working location (office, coworking space, remote) and see when colleagues plan to be in the office, making it easier to pick a common day, schedule meetings and meet in person. A simplified calendar view groups teammates by daily status, custom statuses can be configured to fit company-specific needs, and admins can set weekly reminders so information stays current.

The platform is organized around three areas: Café Community, for discovering colleagues beyond job titles and forming interest-based groups, communities and ERGs; Café Workplace, for sharing and surfacing working-location and "who's where" information; and Café Events, for planning, promoting and managing gatherings from team lunches to company-wide offsites. Additional features listed include a directory, profiles, flex scheduling, space booking, polls and surveys, regional hubs, and analytics covering workplace usage, social and events, and policy compliance. Café also provides admins with office attendance insights such as average occupancy by day of week or month.

Café is delivered as mobile and web apps plus integrations that surface information inside employees' existing tools, including Slack (where Café status can be reflected in Slack status), Microsoft Teams, Google Calendar, calendars and HR systems; an integration with payroll/HR provider PayFit was under development to sync vacation data automatically. The company states SAML-based single sign-on, 24/7 support, GDPR compliance and SOC 2 Type 2 certification.

Founding story

Café was founded in 2020 by brothers Tom Nguyen (co-founder and CEO, previously founder of the B2C mobile app company ASKIP, which reached 6 million downloads) and Arthur Lorotte de Banes (co-founder and CTO, previously a DevOps engineer and cloud solutions architect). As managers in a newly hybrid environment they observed teammates lacking connection, and interviewed 150 companies, finding that firms were coordinating office attendance with spreadsheets.

Business model

Café sells a B2B SaaS workplace engagement platform to employers, with adoption starting inside teams and expanding across the organization; employees are expected to act as internal advocates for wider rollout.

Freemium: teams can sign up and use basic features for free with unlimited seats and no card required, and pay to roll the product out across the organization with more users.

Traction

Y Combinator lists a team size of 10 and an active status. Early customers cited at launch included Livestorm, Jellysmack and Yubo, with later customer references from Gymlib and Livestorm; the site displays review scores of 5 out of 5 and 4.6 out of 5.

Latest developments

Café's website states the company is now backed by Slack and presents an expanded feature set spanning ERGs and communities, directory, event management, flex scheduling, space booking, polls and surveys, regional hubs and workplace analytics, alongside SOC 2 Type 2 certification and SAML single sign-on.