Our Story

The journey to create what would become Kantin began 15+ years ago, when our company founders John Flynn and Steve Plunkett worked together in a large corporate organisation with management responsibility for large, distributed and cross-functional teams and they would often travel to different offices around the world for internal meetings, project meetings and also to interface with staff under their management. In a large corporation it was very noticeable how beneficial it was for work colleagues to meet each other periodically, especially if they were based in different geographies and different time-zones. Aside from the work related meetings, the social connections made were also hugely important - it may simply have been a coffee in the office canteen or a sandwich at lunch time but meeting fellow colleagues in a less formal setting helped facilitate social connections and build relationships which had a direct knock-on benefit to the business. Our founders came up with an idea at the time to create some sort of virtual canteen which could facilitate this regular social interaction between work colleagues who were not co-located.

This idea stayed with us, but life and work intervened and we didn't build on the concept until, fast-forward to the Spring of 2020, we found ourselves, like so many during the global pandemic, not visiting any offices at all let alone having those informal, social conversations in the office. As working practices evolved, with many people spending more time working from home, we saw that our idea had more relevance than ever before and we decided to do something about it. We set out to build that virtual canteen, with the talk rather than the bad coffee, and make it one that everyone could join from wherever they were, whenever they had a moment of downtime.

Having initially explored a 3D prototype in VR and a 3D Desktop prototype as possible solutions, we encountered some obvious early roadblocks such as too few people with (or wanting to use) VR headsets or the need ( in the case of the Desktop 3D application ) for the user to be tied to their PC .

So we distilled the idea down to its core essentials - having quick, unscheduled discussions on topics of your interest at any particular moment …. i.e. Talking. On your ubiquitous mobile device that can move with you. And without video, so you don't have to blur out the background of your messy kitchen, or brush your hair when you are at home !!

So finally Kantin was born, a simple to use, mobile app that enables you talk to colleagues in a more casual manner when it suits your own schedule. You just sign up, tell Kantin what topics you find interesting and then when you feel like a chat you can join a virtual Kantin table or create one of your own. Kantin will even send you notifications when somebody else has created a table with a topic you have registered as an interest and with no obligation to join the conversation, and no obligation to stay - just pop in to the Kantin at coffee-time or whenever it suits you. We hope you like it.