Embrace the meanwhile...
Co-living meets short-term stays. Properties managed with hotel-level service but designed to feel like home. Book through their site, through Airbnb, through Instagram — wherever you find them. Stay a week, stay a month. Then move on. What they didn’t have: a name. An identity. A reason for anyone to care. The co-living space is crowded with functional brands selling convenience. Clean sheets, fast wifi, flexible leases. But nobody was talking about what these spaces actually mean — the strange intimacy of living somewhere that isn’t yours, for a chapter of your life that’s still being written.
Three founders walked in with a business model and nothing else. We gave them a name that turned short-term stays into something worth remembering. We started with a question: what is a temporary home, really? Not a hotel. Not a rental. Something in between — a place you inhabit while you’re becoming someone else. While you figure out the new city, the new job, the new version of yourself. That’s when the cocoon appeared. A caterpillar builds a cocoon not to live in forever, but to transform. It’s temporary by design. And yet — that small, dark, in-between space is where everything changes. The cocoon isn’t incidental to the butterfly. It’s essential. We named the brand Kukun. Spanish speakers hear “cocoon” immediately. Everyone else feels the softness of the word before they understand it. Then we built the story around a single line: Embrace the meanwhile.
0 → 130 properties in 18 months. By late 2023, Kukun was targeting 1,000 properties under management through developer partnerships. $4.5 million seed round secured in late 2022 — from Antelo Capital, FJ Labs, and Bridge Latam. The story we built became the story they pitched. A new category coined. Kukun didn’t position itself as another short-term rental. They claimed “neo-hospitality” — and the market listened. Sub-brands that extend the cocoon. In 2025, they launched Kukun Inspire in Polanco (curated contemporary art) and Kukun Edition Marsella in Juárez (brutalist design). The brand architecture we established gave them room to evolve without losing the thread. The meanwhile became a market.