CoCoCo Turns One: A Year of Connection, Combination & Collaboration

April 8, 2025 – April 8th marked a significant milestone for us at CoCoCo – our first anniversary! Founded by industry veterans Andreas Aplien, Karl Ciz, and John Maxwell, CoCoCo launched with a clear mission: to revolutionise the printing industry through intelligent integration. In just twelve months, CoCoCo has rapidly established itself as a bold and innovative force, built on a foundation of impactful ideas. Our cutting-edge solutions empower print shops to connect, combine, and collaborate – the very values that inspired our name.

Our Vision: Open, Universal, and Effortless Integration

From the outset, CoCoCo aimed to be the pioneering, vendor neutral, open integration platform for the print industry. Our goal was to simplify all integration within print businesses, thereby unlocking the full potential of their existing technology investments, regardless of the manufacturer or system in use.
With decades of collective experience, our founders understood the challenges of working with fragmented systems and diverse data formats like JDF, XML, and evolving APIs. Rather than advocating for costly rip-and-replace strategies, CoCoCo positioned itself as the “Rosetta Stone” of print technologies, facilitating seamless data flow across all platforms and devices.

Early Market Validation at Drupa

Our journey included an early and insightful debut at Drupa, a premier global printing Expo. This engagement provided invaluable real-world feedback.

“It was an incredible opportunity to really test our ideas against customers in the market and learn.”

These insights were crucial in refining our approach, driving us to make integration more universally accessible and radically easier to implement. Our team set an ambitious objective: to make integration so simple and frictionless that total integration for every print shop becomes an obvious choice.

HID 2025: Product Launches and a Revolutionary Pricing Modelv

At Hunkeler Innovation Days (HID) in February 2025, CoCoCo proudly unveiled several key milestones:

CoCollab: A seamless solution for sharing job data, fostering enhanced collaboration.
AI-Powered Platform Setup: Enabling faster and smarter data routing for all users.
“All You Can Integrate” Pricing: A game-changing model offering unlimited integrations and unlimited jobs for a single, affordable monthly fee – “as affordable as a daily lunch,” according to co-founder Karl Ciz.

This bold pricing strategy is designed to democratise powerful integration, enabling smoother automation, making it accessible to commercial print businesses of all sizes and technical infrastructures.

Solving Real Challenges for Print Professionals

CoCoCo’s platform directly addresses the everyday challenges faced by production and prepress teams:

For Production Departments:

Hassle-free integration of diverse software and machinery.
Elimination of data silos, unlocking valuable cross-system visibility
Simplified automation through insightful process analysis.
A centralised dashboard providing comprehensive tracking and insights.

For Prepress Teams:

Effortless onboarding of new software and or equipment.
Streamlined management of data flow.
Live access to crucial production data.
Simplified handling of production system changes and updates.

One satisfied customer shared that CoCoCo successfully connected their ERP, prepress, and post-press systems in just six weeks, stating they “would not have been able to do this within this given time frame with anybody else.”

The Evolving Platform and Future Directions

As we enter our second year, CoCoCo’s vision continues to expand. We are actively developing plug-and-play integration capabilities, envisioning a future where software and machinery from any vendor can be seamlessly integrated through self-download and setup.

The CoCoCo ecosystem now comprises:

CoCore: A centralised data hub intelligently adapting data formats for all connected systems.
CoConnect: Facilitating effortless connectivity for both machines and software.
CoCollab: Enabling seamless job-based data sharing for collaborative workflows.

Looking ahead, our focus includes developing low-code automation tools and leveraging AI-powered solutions to further empower our customers. Our vendor-agnostic approach, supporting all technologies without requiring specific APIs, ensures our platform remains accessible and future-proof.
Our recent membership with CIP4 underscores our ongoing commitment to industry standards and fostering collaboration within the print community.

A Robust Foundation for Continued Growth

In just one year, CoCoCo has transformed from an ambitious concept into a significant player in the print integration landscape. With an unwavering commitment to simplicity, accessibility, and delivering tangible customer value, we are empowering businesses to:

Significantly save time and reduce manual operations.
Unlock their full automation potential.
Foster improved cross-departmental collaboration.
Future-proof their critical infrastructure.

As CoCoCo embarks on its second year, our momentum is stronger than ever. We’ve built a solid foundation, and now we’re scaling rapidly.
Stay connected – the next exciting chapter in print integration is already unfolding.