A Danish coworking case shows what an open API turns coffee into.
A Danish workspace platform now switches coffee machine access on and off with one tick, using the Vendon Cloud API. A small feature, and a good indicator of where smart coffee services are going.
Overall European office vacancy is 9.7%. For Grade A space it is 3.3% (Cushman & Wakefield, European Offices: Shrinking Supply, Q1 2026). Plenty of empty offices, almost no good ones. Companies are taking less space and paying more for it, on condition that it works.
Much of that demand lands in flexible workspace, which CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm, expects to grow from 12% of the London office market to 20% by 2030 (November 2025). A coworking space is really a services business with a property attached, and tenants judge it on the services rather than the floor plan.
Which changes the brief for anyone selling coffee into a workplace. Good coffee has stopped being a perk and become a specification, and a specification has to work on the first morning without a support ticket. That is a telemetry problem before it is a coffee problem, and it is where Vendon Cloud comes in.
Why a new employee gets created six times
Coffee, parking, printing, canteen, door access and meeting rooms usually reach a coworking space from six suppliers with six separate user databases. So every time a tenant company hires somebody, an office manager creates that person six times, then removes them six times when they leave.
“It's a modern API, so we can do everything we want”
Senbee, a platform company in Aarhus, built its product around that. It manages the user once and pushes them out to the coffee machine, the printer, the access control and the canteen, which only works if those suppliers can be reached from outside. According to CEO Tristan White, that is where much of the market falls down.
“We’re vendor agnostic, as long as they can provide APIs, which, surprisingly enough, a lot of vendors are not able to. Vendon has been incredible in this regard. It’s a modern API, so we can do everything we want.”
– Tristan White, CEO of Senbee
How it works at Partnerhuset
Partnerhuset is a new coworking space in Aarhus. When a tenant company hires someone, its own administrator adds them in Senbee Connect and ticks the coffee box. Senbee calls the Vendon Cloud API to create the user and assign an access group, and Vendon Cloud pushes the permission to the vBox IoT device on the coffee machine. The employee taps the same NFC card they already use for the door and the printer, presses a button and gets a coffee. No app, no second card, no email to the operator asking for access.
The machines are serviced by UniPay Systems in Denmark, who recommended Vendon as the payment and management platform.co
Partnerhuset is a new coworking space in Aarhus. When a tenant company hires someone, its own administrator adds them in Senbee Connect and ticks the coffee box. Senbee calls the Vendon Cloud API to create the user and assign an access group, and Vendon Cloud pushes the permission to the vBox IoT device on the coffee machine. The employee taps the same NFC card they already use for the door and the printer, presses a button and gets a coffee. No app, no second card, no email to the operator asking for access.
The machines are serviced by UniPay Systems in Denmark, who recommended Vendon as the payment and management platform.
That recommendation came from Lars Jensen, owner and CEO of UniPay Systems, who was working to a brief his customer had set.
“My customer wanted one system where a single NFC card could handle everything, door entrance, catering, printer, coffee machines and other office systems, instead of juggling separate cards or systems for each.”
Meeting it took two suppliers rather than one.
“I knew this needed two things working together: an integration partner and a hardware and API provider on the coffee machine side. Senbee handled the integration work. For the hardware and API, I brought in Vendon, since they provide both the machine-side hardware and an open API that Senbee could connect into without building something custom from scratch.”
The build itself was short. Once the contract was signed, Senbee needed the API documentation and one cable to the unit, and the connection took a few minutes. Lars puts the whole run from signature to working machines at one to five days, depending on the customer’s own setup.
One detail mattered more than anyone expected. Vendon’s NFC reader read the Danish tags already in circulation, which not every reader does, and that widened the range of buildings the solution can go into.
Two things here are easy to miss. The coworking space has stopped administering users altogether, because access now sits with the tenant company where the hiring happens. And Vendon remains the engine.
“Vendon is still the engine here. We’re not handling payments, we’re not handling the placement of the orders. We’re not trying to replace any vendor, ever.”
One coffee machine API, both directions
The API covers more than users and permissions, and works both ways. Every cup dispensed on a connected coffee machine is logged with product, time and user group, so an operator can see which drinks move and when the peaks fall, and each tenant company can account for its own coffee.
For UniPay that became billing. They now invoice each company on site for its exact consumption instead of a flat or estimated figure. Senbee has named per-tenant statistics as its next build. Vendon’s QuickPik app covers mobile payment and loyalty where an operator wants those alongside card access.
The same reporting does work for Lars well outside this one building.
“The reporting side is where it really helps us day to day. We can see remotely what’s happening with the machines and with customer activity, all from the office, without needing to be on-site. That matters most when a customer calls with a question. I can pull up the data with them, walk through what’s actually happening, and give them a real answer instead of guessing.”
The layer under the modern workspace
Senbee advises new coworking spaces on vendor selection and expects to recommend Vendon to them, because a partner that integrates the first time is worth naming to a client.
Europe’s flight to quality — the move into fewer, better buildings — has less to do with the lobby than with whether a building behaves like a product, where a person exists once and every service around them recognises it without anyone filling in a form. When that works, nobody notices. Coffee machine telemetry, IoT and an open API are what make it work, and they do it without anyone replacing a machine.
Europe’s workspaces are being rebuilt one service at a time. Vendon connects the coffee to the rest of the building.
“What I like about Vendon is that it feels like a modern layer you can put on top of even older machines, like giving them new brains, without needing to replace the hardware itself.”
Tristan White, CEO of Senbee
Working with a workspace platform, or building one?
The Vendon Cloud coffee machine API is open to integration partners. Talk to us about your integration.
