About Coddy

Didier Boulvin and Sébastien Balieu had not seen each other in more than ten years. In 2017 they picked the conversation up where they had left it. Didier was maintaining accounting software. Sébastien was running One More Pixel, his development agency.

Didier had been carrying an idea around for a while: take team building out of the seminar room and put it in the street, driven by an app.

One detail stood in the way. Neither of them knew anything about mapping or geolocation. So they went looking for someone who did. They found Stéphane Draux, a specialist in mobile applications and Google Maps. His answer to their proposal fits in one sentence: you two seem alright, come on, let us start a company.

The three of them wound down their respective activities and founded Kalio, a web and mobile development agency. The agency paid for daily life. Coddy moved forward alongside it, between client projects.

First test version in November 2019. Public launch in February 2020.

The first game was called Rise of the Dead Brussels. It goes by Zombie Invasion today. Brussels streets, a horde, and players running for real.

The original model was event based: urban games organised on fixed dates, several teams competing in the same city at the same moment. A few weeks after launch, everything closed. The events fell through. In October 2020, a Halloween launch planned in two cities was cancelled on the day itself.

The product itself still stood up. Four people outside with a phone was one of the few things still allowed.

Coddy dropped the event format and made its games playable at any moment, with no slot to book. What was meant to be a fallback became the model. To this day, most players buy their game to play it within the hour.

In January 2022, Coddy raised 600,000 euros from Digital Attraxion, finance&invest.brussels, the crowdfunding platform Spreds and business angels.

The money went into an international team and into game production. Coddy went from a handful of Belgian cities to 74 cities across 9 countries.

The idea from that 2017 conversation, the one that had created the company, still had not been launched.

In 2023, Coddy finally put it into production: urban team building, then school outings. Six years between the idea and the product.

Today the business splits evenly. Half the players are families and groups of friends. The other half are company teams and school classes.