Café raises $1m to ease the shift to hybrid working

It looks likely that the future of work is going to be flexible and hybrid. In this model, individuals can choose how to split their time between remote and office-based working.

Although this sounds like a great solution for both employees and businesses, implementing hybrid working is going to be a real challenge for many businesses across the globe.

French HR tech startup Café, which aims to make it easier for companies to switch from full-time remote working to a hybrid model, has raised $1 million in Seed funding.

According to TechCrunch, the investment came from 122West, Kima Ventures, Jonathan Widawski, Guillaume Lestrade, and Jacques-Edouard Sabatier, among others.

Café is more than just a desk booking tool. Although it does allow employees to say when they will be in the office or when they will be working remotely, it also gives companies and individual employees easy visibility about who is and isn’t in the office on certain days.

Therefore, the platform makes it easy for managers to know when to schedule in-person meetings or social activities with their teams.

The exact status message can be customized to accurately represent what the employee is up to – for instance, it could say ‘working from a café’, thereby giving more context to teams beyond just knowing that person is not in the office.

Ultimately, the platform aims to replace and upgrade the spreadsheet approach it found many companies were using. It makes the experience more fun and managers can set up weekly reminders to nudge their teams to update the app with their working location plans for the coming week.

Café’s tool integrates into various existing collaboration tools – including Slack – and now the startup is working on being able to integrate deeper into teams’ HRIS tools.

For now at least, Café will be free to use for individuals and teams, but if it is rolled out widely across organizations, these will need to pay for the service.