Kais Khimji has spent most of his professional career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at prominent venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
But like many other former Sequoia partners, including David Vélez, who founded Brazilian digital bank Nubank, Khimji (pictured left) has always wanted to be a startup founder. On Thursday, he announced that he had revived an idea he started working on as a student at Harvard about 10 years ago, turning it into the AI calendar scheduling company Blockit. In a major vote of confidence, Khimji’s former employer, Sequoia, led the company’s $5 million seed round.
“Blockit has the opportunity to become a $1 billion-plus revenue business, and Kais will ensure it gets there,” Pat Grady, general partner and co-manager of Sequoia who led the investment, wrote in a statement. blog post.
While many startups have attempted to automate scheduling in the past, Khimji believes that thanks to advances in LLMs, Blockit’s AI agents can handle scheduling more fluidly and efficiently than many of their predecessors, including now-defunct startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that domain name ended up with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company.)
Unlike the current category leader, Calendly, which was last valued at $3 billion and relies on users sharing links to find availability, Blockit is betting that its AI agents can master the nuances needed to handle the entire scheduling process without human involvement.
With Blockit, Khimji and co-founder John Hahn, who previously worked on calendar products including Timeful, Google Calendar and Clockwise, are building what is essentially an AI social network for people’s time.
“It always seemed very strange to me. I have a time database: my calendar. You have a time database: your calendar, and our databases just can’t talk to each other,” Khimji told TechCrunch.
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Khimji says Blockit may finally address this disconnect. When two users need to meet, their respective AI agents communicate directly to negotiate a time, completely avoiding the typical back-and-forth emails.
Users can invoke the Blockit agent by copying it to an email or messaging it in Slack about a meeting. The robot then takes care of the logistics and negotiates a mutually convenient time and location that fits the preferences of all participants.
Khimji said Blockit can function as seamlessly as a human executive assistant. Users simply need to provide the system with specific instructions about their preferences, such as which meetings are non-negotiable and which are “movable” based on daily needs. “Sometimes my schedule is crazy, so I need to skip lunch, and the agent needs to know that it’s okay to skip lunch,” he said.
The system can even be trained to prioritize meetings based on the tone of an email. For example, a user could tell the agent that a meeting request signed with a formal “Best regards” should take priority over an informal interaction that ends with “Regards.”
By knowing its users’ preferences, Blockit appears to be capitalizing on what venture firm Foundation Capital partners Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg call “context graphs.” in a widely shared essayInvestors describe a multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents to capture the “why” behind every business decision based on hidden logic that previously only existed in a person’s head.
Blockit is already being used by more than 200 companies, including AI startup Together.ai, newly acquired fintech company Brex, and robotics startup Rogo, as well as venture firms a16z, Accel, and Index. The app is available free of charge for 30 days. After that, it costs $1,000 a year for individual users and $5,000 a year for a team license with multi-user support, Khimji said.
