In the kotlinx.coroutines library you can start new coroutine using either launch (with join) or async (with await<
Alongside the other great answers, for the people familiar with Rx and getting into coroutines, async returns a Deferred which is akin to Single while launch returns a Job that is more akin to Completable. You can .await() to block and get the value of the first one, and .join() to block until the Job is completed.