Sequoia’s new startup is using AI to negotiate your calendar

Kais Khimji has spent a long time in his investment career, including six years as a partner at the prestigious VC firm Sequoia Capital.

But like several other former Sequoia partners – including David Vélez, founder of Brazilian digital bank Nubank – Khimji (pictured left) has always wanted to be a founder. On Thursday, he announced that he had revived an idea he started working on as a student at Harvard nearly 10 years ago, turning it into the AI ​​calendar company Blockit. Feeling very confident, Khimji’s former employer, Sequoia, led the company in a $5 million investment.

“Blockit has the potential to become a $1Bn+ business, and Kais will make sure it gets there,” Pat Grady, Sequoia’s senior partner and managing partner who led the investment, wrote in a statement. blog post.

Although many startups have tried to schedule in the past, Khimji believes that thanks to the progress of LLMs, Blockit’s AI assistants can handle scheduling better and more efficiently than many of their predecessors, including the failed startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that brand name ended up with Elon Musk’s AI company.)

Unlike the leader of the modern Caendly group, which was very important $3 billion and relies on users sharing links to gain access, Blockit is betting that its AI assistants can better figure out what’s needed to handle the entire system without human intervention.

With Blockit, Khimji and co-founder John Hahn — who previously worked on calendars, including Timeful, Google Calendar, and Clockwise — are creating what is essentially an AI social network for people’s time.

“It always feels weird. I have a time database – my calendar. You have a time database – your calendar, and our databases don’t talk to each other,” Khimji told TechCrunch.

Khimji says that Blockit can finally solve this conflict. When two users need to meet, their AI assistants connect directly to chat for a while, bypassing back-and-forth emails entirely.

Users can invite a blockit assistant by copying it to an email or sending a message to Slack about the meeting. The bot then takes the information, and negotiates the right time and place that suits the actions of all the participants.

Khimji said Blockit can work seamlessly as a great personal assistant. Users only need to give the system specific instructions about their preferences, such as which meetings are non-negotiable and which are “flexible” based on day-to-day needs. “Sometimes my calendar is crazy, so I have to skip lunch, and the assistant has to know that it’s okay for me to skip lunch,” she said.

The system can also be trained to prioritize meetings based on email tone. For example, a user can instruct an agent that a meeting request signed with “best wishes” takes precedence over a normal interaction that ends with “Cheers.”

By learning what users like, Blockit appears to be making good use of what Foundation Capital partners Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg call “internal graphs”. In a a very shared storyinvestors describe the multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI assistants to capture the “why” behind every business decision by relying on the hidden logic that once existed in the human head.

Blockit is already used by more than 200 companies, including AI startup Together.ai, the newly discovered fintech company Brex, and robotics startup Rogo, as well as venture capital firms 16z, Accel, and Index. The software is available for free for 30 days. After that, it costs $1,000 a year for individual users and $5,000 a year for a team license and support for multiple users, Khimji said.