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If you’ve ever stepped into a booth at a co-working space, you know just how cramped up that experience can be. Sometimes there’s barely enough room to place your laptop or move your elbows. You are likely getting out of there as soon as you can.
Bubl, a San Francisco startup launched by Uber alumni, thinks it doesn’t have to be that way. And having stepped into one of their work booths at CES this year, I have to agree with them.
Designed to be assembled in less than 90 minutes and available for delivery anywhere in the US and Canada, Bubl’s booths are spacious, sound-proofed and elegant. They’re actually enjoyable to spend time in. To achieve this, the pod is equipped with lighting at the top that is just so, and a built-in monitor that can be configured to display the kind of focus background imagery and sound many of us need. There’s enough space to sit on a chair, with the height of the desk and monitor adjusting to whatever is needed.
It makes for not only a perfect area to focus but also a great conferencing solution. The touch display has a built-in camera that, coupled with the booth’s sound system, make Zoom calls a breeze. It’s telling that once inside, I couldn’t hear any noise from the crowds walking by in the CES corridors.
In short, Bubl has come up with a modern design solution that’s heaps better than what most offices, event venues or other common workspaces might have. I’d wager that for some it might even make sense to have one at home. To learn more about it, I spoke to their COO, Kailash Hiremath – interview below, edited for clarity.
We’ve been in market for about a year. We’ve got customers in different verticals – banking, finance, tech, energy and government – and this is the first booth that offers really intelligent features.
Traditional booths are just used as private spaces. You come in and use your own laptop or device. Our booths have a full-blown computer with a touchscreen that’s integrated into the booth, which has calendar booking, zoom and video conferencing features built in.
One of the biggest features that a lot of our users traditionally use is the wellness feature. If you want to concentrate and focus, you can choose from different types of wellness backgrounds, features and lighting.
Our whole ethos is to be able to enable workers to come into the booth for 30 minutes and be able to output 60 minutes’ worth of work on that same time because they are so productive and focused while inside.
One of the new things we launched at CES was a bunch of AI features where the booth becomes more of a presence that can be voice-enabled and can assist you with certain functions.
For example, for CES we loaded a bunch of content so that you can ask it info like when does the show close, what times events take place and other interactions like that. So if you’re an organisation you can preload your own organisation’s content, say to help a new employee on their first day with onboarding tasks and info for example.
We are also experimenting with other human resource types of tasks, like asking the booth for help with giving feedback to team members, preparing for a one-on-one with a manager, and working on a pitch for a sales call or sales-enablement training.
We have units in our warehouse in the Bay Area, and we drop-ship anywhere across the United States. We have some customers in Canada as well. We are pretty flexible in working directly with any of our end customers and also with dealers and distributors.
It really depends on the purchase model, but typically when you order, we can drop-ship within a week, and it comes flat-packed. Typically, customers have their own installers but we also have install partners that we can provide. There’s a simple video on how this all goes together and within 90 minutes, you can set up a booth. It’s a pretty quick, turnkey process.
We charge a flat fee for the hardware and then an annual licence fee for the software and everything else.
Roughly it’s about $10,000 for the hardware, and then $1,200 a year for the software. For the $1,200 you get all the integrations for the apps, like Microsoft Team, Zoom, Google Workspace integrations, as well as the wellness features and warranty.
Right now Dexcom is a pretty big customer in San Diego. We’ve also got 20 units at USC, down in LA and that’s an interesting one because of the mix of use cases, between students and faculty. Students are using them to watch lectures, live and recorded, doing homework etc whereas faculty are using it to host office hours and stuff like that. We’re seeing really high usage from those customers.
Right now we’re basically assembling a playbook on our sales model so it becomes rinse and repeat. We’ve had success when companies are building a new office or now that companies are returning to work. Equally, now that more people are in this sort of hybrid work environment, you’re starting to see companies looking for more private office spaces.
So really timing is on our side in 2025.
On top of that, we already have built in a lot of the AI features that offices are trying to adopt, so that makes it appealing for companies to approach it that way without having to stuff features or content into individual computers.
We’ve had some inquiries and we are flexible but our focus for now is B2B.
