HippoCampus is a data-driven marketing and customer-experience agency in Israel. Co-founders Lior Peleg and Ori Indursky have built it since 2016 into a team that runs campaigns for clients like L'Oréal, Nintendo and Kornit Digital. When the agency moved to a hybrid setup, some days in the office and most from home, Lior worried about the thing small teams quietly rely on.
"We usually worked with Google Meet. Once we decided to go hybrid, we needed a way to communicate internally without switching and sending Google Meet links every time. We wanted something where you can just come, click, and talk to someone, like you'd walk up to them in the office. So we looked for a virtual office app, and we found Cosmos. It's almost like being physically in the same office."
HippoCampus wasn't searching for a virtual office. They didn't even know the category existed, until a peer pointed them to it.
"It's funny, because we weren't even aware a solution like this existed. We were talking to a big gaming company, and they told us they were going hybrid and this was how they kept communicating internally when working from home: they had a virtual office. So we started looking, and we tried Cosmos."
For a small agency, Lior's case for a virtual office isn't really about meetings. It's about the conversations that were never scheduled in the first place.
"We're a small business, not a big enterprise. On a small team, you hire people who think out of the box and give you ideas, even on things that aren't strictly their role. That's the kind of thing you get when you're in the kitchen making a coffee and someone overhears and says, 'hey, I have an idea, you can try this.' That's what you lose when you go hybrid, and it's what we wanted to preserve."
The other loss is speed. A question too small for a meeting often just doesn't get asked.
"Sometimes you have a really small question, and you don't want to pick up the phone or send a Google Meet link. You just want to grab the person sitting near you and ask what they'd do. That's easy in a small office, and you lose it when you're working remotely."
Lior doesn't like Slack. The default tool for team chat never worked for HippoCampus internally.
"We use Slack, but I don't really like it. It's so complicated when you just want to talk to someone. We have so many different channels, and every time you work with someone new, you make another one. For internal communication, it's just not the best. We use it because our clients use it."
Booking a call had the same problem: the friction was enough to lose the question.
"Without Cosmos, you go to your calendar, book a meeting, send the invite. Or you make a link and send it on WhatsApp or email. It just takes more time, and when you only want to ask something quick, those extra couple of minutes are enough to think, 'I won't ask, I'll figure it out myself.' We found a way to talk to each other by clicking, not by turning it into something that takes effort to start."
Rolling Cosmos out to the team turned out to be easy, because Lior framed it as the thing they already missed.
"Our concern was the same as theirs. They like being in the office because they want to talk to each other. So we told them we were looking for a way to do the same small talks they were already doing, but virtually. It wasn't something we forced on them. It was easy."
Nearly six months on, Cosmos is simply where the team works.
"Everyone logs on in the morning, and it's used all day. All of us just use it."
The clearest sign of how central Cosmos has become is what Lior asks for next. HippoCampus runs its own AI engine that transcribes and summarises every client call to track the work per account, and the one feature he wants is for Cosmos calls to feed straight into it.
Lior Peleg
Co-founder - HippoCampus
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