Kais Khimji spent most of his professional career as a venture capitalist, including six years as an associate at the prominent venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
But just like several other former Sequoia partners – including David Vélez, founder of Brazilian digital bank Nubank – Khimji (pictured right) 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 funding round.
“Blockit has a chance to become a $1 billion-plus revenue company, and Kais will ensure it gets there,” Pat Grady, Sequoia general partner and co-manager 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 seamlessly and efficiently than many of its predecessors, including the now-defunct startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that domain name ended up being owned by Elon Musk’s AI company.)
Unlike current category leader Calendly, which was last rated at 3 billion dollars and relies on users sharing links to find availability, Blockit is betting that its AI agents can master the nuances needed to manage the entire scheduling process without human involvement.
With Blockit, Khimji and co-founder John Han – who has 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 can finally resolve this disconnect. When two users need to meet, their respective AI agents communicate directly to negotiate a time, avoiding typical email exchanges.
Users can call the Blockit agent by copying it into an email or sending it a message in Slack about a meeting. The robot then takes care of the logistics, negotiating a mutually convenient time and location that matches the preferences of all participants.
Khimji said Blockit can operate 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 “mobile” based on daily needs. “Sometimes my schedule is crazy, so I have to skip lunch, and the agent has to know that I can skip lunch,” he said.
The system can even be trained to prioritize meetings based on the tone of an email. For example, a user can tell the agent that a meeting request signed with a formal “Best regards” should take precedence over an informal interaction ending with “Cheers.”
By knowing its users’ preferences, Blockit appears to capitalize on what Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg, partners at venture capital firm Foundation Capital, call “contextual graphs.” In a widely shared essayinvestors describe a multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents to grasp the “why” behind every business decision by tapping into the hidden logic that previously existed only in a person’s head.
Blockit is already used by more than 200 companies, including AI startup Together.ai, the newly acquired financial technology company Brex and robotics startup Rogo, as well as venture capital firms a16z, Accel and Index. The app is available for free for 30 days. After that, it costs $1,000 per year for individual users and $5,000 per year for a team license with support for multiple users, Khimji said.