Der Pabio-Blog fasst unsere Geschäfts-, Technik- und Designgeschichten an einem Ort zusammen. Folge uns hier und bleibe auf dem Laufenden, was bei Pabio gerade passiert.

Pabio Blog

Blog

Folge dem Pabio Geschäftsblog und bleibe auf dem Laufenden über unsere neuesten Produkteinführungen, Finanzierungsankündigungen und Geschäftsupdates.

Pabio Geschäftsblog

Company

Bei Pabio ist gutes Design das Herzstück von allem, was wir tun - von personalisierter Inneneinrichtung bis hin zu einem wunderbaren digitalen Erlebnis. Der Pabio Design Blog vereint Ideen aus unserer Erfahrung im gesamten Designbereich.

Pabio Design Blog

Design

Pabio ist im Herzen ein Technologieunternehmen, und unser Ingenieurteam teilt seine Erfahrungen bei der Entwicklung digitaler Produkte im Pabio Engineering Blog mit.

Pabio Engineering Blog

Engineering

Mit schwerem Herzen müssen wir uns heute von Ihnen verabschieden. Nach einem herausfordernden Jahr, sehen wir uns nun in der Situation, für Pabio (Koj AG) den Konkurs einreichen zu müssen.

Als Anand und ich 2020 Pabio gründeten, war unser Ziel nichts Geringeres als das moderne Wohnen zu revolutionieren und hochwertige Wohnräume erschwinglich und für alle zugänglich zu machen. Wir durften uns über ein stetiges Wachstum freuen und konnten über die drei Jahre mehr als hundert Wohnungen in der Schweiz und Deutschland einrichten und unseren Kunden so ein schönes Zuhause verschaffen.

Unser Geschäftsmodell war stark abhängig von unserem Finanzierungspartner: Dieser ermöglichte es uns, die Möbel anzuschaffen und sie in der monatlichen Miete an unsere Kunden weiterzugeben. Ohne eine entsprechende Finanzierung ist es leider nicht möglich, unser Geschäft fortzuführen.

Gegen Ende des vergangenen Jahres stellte unser Finanzierungspartner unerwartet die Ausgabe von Krediten ein, eine Folge der globalen Wirtschaftskrise und ansteigenden Zinsen. Leider wurde uns dies nicht frühzeitig mitgeteilt, wodurch wir unter starken Zeitdruck gerieten. Trotz intensiver Bemühungen um alternative Finanzierungswege, konnten wir die entstandene Herausforderung nicht bewältigen und mussten uns eingestehen, dass eine Fortsetzung unseres Geschäfts unter diesen Bedingungen leider nicht machbar ist.

Bis zuletzt haben wir alles in unserer Macht stehende getan, um Pabio zu retten. Es gab bereits fortgeschrittene Verhandlungen mit einem interessierten Käufer aus Deutschland. Leider scheiterten diese Gespräche an der fehlenden Zustimmung unseres Finanzierungspartners. Vor diesem Hintergrund sehen wir uns nun gezwungen, den Konkurs anzumelden. Dieser Schritt fällt uns allen nicht leicht und wir bedauern es zutiefst. Das gesamte Team von Pabio hat unermüdlich rund um die Uhr gearbeitet, um unsere Vision Wirklichkeit werden zu lassen.

Abschliessend möchte ich mich von ganzem Herzen bei unseren Kunden, Lieferanten und Investoren für die Unterstützung bedanken. Sie alle waren ein integraler Bestandteil unserer Vision und Ihr Vertrauen war und bleibt unsere grösste Motivation und Inspiration. Ich, zusammen mit dem gesamten Pabio-Team, bin Ihnen zutiefst dankbar.

Pabio schliesst

Pabio is shutting down

We're excited to share that Pabio has raised a seed round of $2.2 million and expanded our offering to Berlin, Germany.

We announced our pre-seed round of $1 million in August (

Pabio raises $1M pre-seed and joins Y Combinator

) led by Serpentine Ventures (Swiss Startup Group) and Session.VC. Since then, we've grown to serving over 100 homes in Switzerland and are delighted to launch in our first German city.

Our existing investors Serpentine Ventures and Session.VC participated in our seed round, and they were joined by some great European and American funds and angels, including Tomahawk.VC, Pioneer Fund, and DD Venture Capital.

We're working hard on making Pabio available in more cities over the next few months, so stay tuned for more announcements in 2022!

Haje Kamps of TechCrunch wrote about our seed round and launch in Berlin:

Tim Brady of Y Combinator (former Chief Product Officer of Yahoo! and co-founder of Imagine K12) was also quoted in the article:

Furniture rental company Pabio expands to Germany

Pabio raises $2.2M seed and launches in Berlin

We're excited to share that Pabio has raised a pre-seed round of $1 million from top investors including Swiss Startup Group and Session.VC, and has joined the S21 cohort of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley-based program for top startups.

Pabio is one of the first companies founded in Switzerland to receive an investment from Y Combinator, which has a portfolio of companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Coinbase. We'd like to say a big thanks to our YC partners Michael Seibel (co-founder of Twitch and Socialcam), Tim Brady (former Chief Product Officer at Yahoo!), Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment), Diana Hu (co-founder of Escher Reality, acquired by Niantic), for supporting us.

Our early investors Swiss Startup Group and Session.VC, and several angels have been with us on this exciting journey from the beginning, so we'd like to say a big thanks to them for believing in us. Our mission is to democratize beautiful living and we're very excited about what lays ahead.

We still remember we asked our friends why they live in apartments with awful interior, they gave us two reasons: first, interior design seems elitist and expensive; and second, buying a full apartment interior is (a) too expensive, and (b) doesn't make sense if you rent an apartment and don't know how long you're going to stay in it. Back then, we figured that if we combine both things—interior design and furniture rental—we can create an affordable package for tenants that's still very high-quality. With our pre-seed funding, we will continue to scale operations and will be participating in the YC Demo Day in the next few weeks.

Pabio raises $1M pre-seed and join Y Combinator

We're delighted to share that we've completed our rebranding from Koj to Pabio, and launched our new website at 

We founded Koj last year after realizing that the furniture industry is completely out of date. A tiny percent of all furniture is purchased online, and most people drive to a big furniture retailer in the outskirts of their city, waste several hours, and return with something they'll end up replacing in a few years. With our furniture subscription with personalized interior design, we aim to offer a better, more sustainable, and more affordable alternative to this.

As much as we loved our name, our customers told us that it was hard to pronounce ("Koj" is pronounced like "koi" pond), and using a 

 domain made it even harder to remember. After 

 months of ideation, exploration, and testing, we're happy to share our new name with the world — Pabio.

We like to say ˈpɑːbɪəʊ (rhymes with 

), though some of our Americans friends like to say ˈpæbɪəʊ (rhymes with 

). No matter how to say it, it's friendly and memorable. With our new name, we have a new website, pabio.com, where you can get a free interior design consultation, schedule your deliveries, make online payments, and manage your apartment.

And we have more... stay tuned for another exciting announcement in the coming weeks!

We're happy to announce that we've completed our rebranding from Koj to Pabio and launched our new website at pabio.com.

Koj is now Pabio

We use Sapper and Svelte for the Pabio's old website, and we have a pretty comprehensive CI/CD build process. The process includes running unit tests, Cypress end-to-end tests, Lighthouse audits, Semantic Release versioning, and finally exporting a static version of the site which is then published.

This, however, means that the entire CI flow from commit push to deployment takes between 3 and 4.5 minutes, which might be too late for emergency deployments for important bug fixes. For this, we made a “fast” deployment process that skips all tests and just exports, purges, and deploys. This takes less than a minute, but of course is dangerous and should only be used in exceptional circumstances (luckily, we haven’t had the need for this yet).

For the Fast Deploy GitHub Actions workflow, we make sure that the last commit message includes the text

to skip the process altogether. This is a separate workflow that only runs when the

flag is present in a commit, so it’s skipped in almost all pushes.

In this workflow, we only checkout the repository, install Node.js and then the dependencies, and build the static site. Then, we push it to the

branch and deploy that branch on our CDN, while force-purging its cache to make sure all users will see the most recent version.

Of course, this is not recommended for day-to-day use and only for those specific emergencies when you need to push your code really quickly.

We use Sapper and Svelte for the Pabio website, and we have a pretty comprehensive CI/CD build process. The process includes running unit tests, Cypress end-to-end tests, Lighthouse audits, Semantic Release versioning, and finally exporting a static version of the site which is then published.

Fast GitHub Actions deployments for emergencies

We just published our first few blog posts, and after exploring several different content management systems, we decided to use

. Strapi is an open-source headless CMS written in Node.js; it works with most database management systems and it’s super easy to deploy.

In this quick guide, we’ll go through our process of using the Strapi API with Svelte and Sapper to generate a blog with categories and author pages.

Before heading to the Svelte code, you should create the following content types in Strapi:

, and blog posts and team members also include a rich text field named

for syntax highlighting. Get started by installing these dependencies:

npm install axios markdown-it highlight-js fs-extra

If you use TypeScript like we do, you’ll need these types installed as well:

npm install --save-dev @types/axios @types/fs-extra @types/highlight.js @types/markdown-it

This endpoint will return the contents of blog posts by locating them as JSON files in the

directory. We will programmatically write these files using a helper. Let’s create a file in the project root,

With the above helper, we generate the following files:

To generate these, run this script following:

Then, we create the single blog post page

Lastly, we repeat the process and create the

routes in the categories and authors directories under

We just published our first few blog posts, and after exploring several different content management systems, we decided to use Strapi. Strapi is an open-source headless CMS written in Node.js; it works with most database management systems and it’s super easy to deploy.

Creating a Sapper blog using Strapi

We live in a subscription economy. And while most industries adapted to this new reality there is one that stood still. The furniture industry is completely out of date. It has barely seen any change in the past decades. Consumers have to buy furniture the same way they did during the pre-internet era. They drive to a big furniture retail facility in the outskirts of a city. Roam the huge retail space for hours and return with a cheap, short-lasting bookshelf that they will have to replace a few years down the road.

At Pabio we are convinced that it is time for a change. Our mission is to offer a better, more sustainable and cheaper alternative to traditional furniture retail.

This is the start of a new adventure. To find out more go to