Former Sequoia partner’s new startup uses AI to negotiate your calendar for you

Kais Khimji has spent astir of his nonrecreational vocation arsenic a task investor, including six years arsenic a spouse astatine the salient VC steadfast Sequoia Capital.

But conscionable similar respective different erstwhile Sequoia partners—including David Velez, who founded the Brazilian integer slope Nubank—Khimji (pictured left) has ever wanted to beryllium a startup founder. On Thursday, helium announced that helium has revived an thought helium began moving connected arsenic a pupil astatine Harvard astir 10 years ago, turning it into the AI calendar-scheduling institution Blockit. In a large ballot of confidence, Khimji’s erstwhile employer, Sequoia, led the company’s $5 cardinal effect round.

“Blockit has a accidental to go a $1Bn+ gross business, and Kais volition marque definite it gets there,” Pat Grady, Sequoia’s wide spouse and co-steward who led the investment, wrote successful a blog post.

While galore startups person tried to automate scheduling successful the past, Khimji believes that acknowledgment to advances successful LLMs, Blockit’s AI agents tin grip scheduling much seamlessly and efficiently than galore of its predecessors, including now-defunct startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that domain sanction ended up with Elon Musk’s AI company.)

Unlike the existent class person Calendly, which was past valued astatine $3 billion and relies connected users sharing links to find availability, Blockit is betting that its AI agents tin maestro the nuance required to grip the full scheduling process without quality involvement.

With Blockit, Khimji and co-founder John Hahn, who antecedently worked connected calendar products including Timeful, Google Calendar, and Clockwise, are gathering what is fundamentally an AI societal web for people’s time.

“It ever felt precise odd. I person a clip database—my calendar. You person a clip database—your calendar, and our databases conscionable can’t speech to each other,” Khimji told TechCrunch.

Khimji says that Blockit tin yet lick this disconnection. When 2 users request to meet, their respective AI agents pass straight to negociate a time, bypassing the emblematic back-and-forth emails entirely.

Users tin invoke the Blockit cause by copying it connected an email oregon messaging it successful Slack astir a meeting. The bot past takes implicit the logistics, negotiating a mutually convenient clip and determination that fits the preferences of each participants.

Khimji said that Blockit tin enactment arsenic seamlessly arsenic a quality enforcement assistant. Users simply request to supply the strategy with circumstantial instructions astir their preferences, specified arsenic which meetings are non-negotiable and which are “movable” based connected regular needs. “Sometimes my calendar is crazy, truthful I request to skip lunch, and the cause needs to cognize that it’s good to skip lunch,” helium said.

The strategy tin adjacent beryllium trained to prioritize meetings based connected the code of an email. For instance, a idiosyncratic mightiness instruct the cause that a gathering petition signed with a ceremonial “Best regards” should instrumentality precedence implicit a casual enactment ending with “Cheers.”

By learning the preferences of its users, Blockit appears to beryllium capitalizing connected what task steadfast Foundation Capital’s partners Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg telephone “context graphs.” In a widely shared essay, the investors picture a multi-billion-dollar accidental for AI agents to seizure the “why” down each concern determination by relying connected the hidden logic that antecedently lone existed successful a person’s head.

Blockit is already being utilized by much than 200 companies, including AI startup Together.ai, the newly acquired fintech institution Brex, and robotics startup Rogo, arsenic good arsenic task firms a16z, Accel, and Index. The app is disposable for escaped for 30 days. After that, it costs $1,000 annually for idiosyncratic users and $5,000 annually for a squad licence with supports aggregate users, Khimji said.