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

Kais Khimji has spent most of his professional career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at leading venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

But like several 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 has revived an idea he started working on about a decade ago as an undergraduate at Harvard and turned it into the AI ​​calendar planning 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 company, and Kais will ensure it gets there,” Pat Grady, Sequoia general partner and co-steward who led the investment, wrote in a statement. blog post.

While many startups have tried to automate scheduling in the past, Khimji believes advances in LLMs will allow Blockit’s AI agents to handle scheduling more seamlessly and efficiently than many of its predecessors, including now-defunct startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that domain name ended up with Elon Musk’s AI company.)

Unlike 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 nuance needed to handle the entire scheduling process without human intervention.

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 felt very strange. 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.

Khimji says Blockit can finally solve this disconnect. When two users need to meet, their respective AI agents communicate directly to negotiate a time, completely bypassing 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 bot then takes over the logistics and negotiates a mutually convenient time and location that suits the preferences of all participants.

Khimji said Blockit can work as seamlessly as a human executive assistant. Users simply need to give the system specific instructions about their preferences, such as which meetings are non-negotiable and which are “movable” based on daily needs. “Sometimes my schedule gets mixed up, so I have to skip lunch, and the officer needs to know it’s OK 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 can instruct the agent that a meeting request signed with the formal “Kind regards” should take precedence over an informal interaction ending with “Cheers.”

By learning the preferences of its users, Blockit appears to be taking advantage of what venture firm Foundation Capital’s partners Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg call “context graphs.” In one widely shared essaythe investors describe a multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents to capture the “why” behind every business decision by relying on the hidden logic that previously existed only in a person’s mind.

Blockit is already 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 for free for 30 days. After that, it will cost $1,000 per year for individual users and $5,000 per year for a team license with multi-user support, Khimji said.