Kais Khimji has spent most of his professional career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at prominent VC firm Sequoia Capital.
But like several other former Sequoia partners — including David Vélez, who founded Brazilian digital bank Nubank — Khimji (pictured left) always wanted to be a startup founder. On Thursday, he announced that he has revived an idea he started working on as a student at Harvard about 10 years ago, turning it into the AI calendaring 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 revenue business, and Kais will make sure it gets there,” wrote Pat Grady, a general partner and partner at Sequoia who led the investment. blog post.
While many startups have tried to automate programming in the past, Khimji believes that thanks to advances in LLMs, Blockit’s AI agents can handle programming more seamlessly and efficiently than many of its predecessors, including now-defunct startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that domain name ended up at 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 details 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 world time.
“It always felt very weird. 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 solve this disconnect. When two users need to meet, their respective AI agents contact them directly to negotiate a time, completely bypassing standard mail correspondence.
Users can invoke the Blockit agent by copying it into an email or messaging it on Slack about a meeting. The bot then handles the logistics, negotiating a mutually convenient time and location that suits the preferences of all participants.
Khimji said Blockit can work just 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 day-to-day needs. “Sometimes my schedule is crazy, so I have to skip lunch, and the agent has to know that it’s okay to skip lunch,” she 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 invitation signed with a formal greeting should take precedence over a casual interaction that ends with “Congratulations.”
By learning the preferences of its users, Blockit looks to capitalize on what venture capital firm Foundation Capital partners Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg call “ambient graphs.” In one widely shared essayinvestors are describing a multibillion-dollar opportunity for artificial intelligence agents to capture the “why” behind every business decision, drawing on the hidden logic that previously existed only in a person’s head.
Blockit is already used by more than 200 companies, including artificial intelligence 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 costs $1,000 per year for individual users and $5,000 per year for a group license with multi-user support, Khimji said.
