AI may not be able to replace Google Search just yet, but it can be useful in more specific contexts — including handling the drudgery involved in performing everyday tasks like scheduling meetings. This is the principle behind the new startup, Skejwhich offers an AI assistant that you can pull back through your emails to find the best time for everyone to meet.
Unlike other scheduling solutions like Calendly, Skej doesn’t require you to browse someone’s availability to find a time to meet. In fact, if someone sends you a Calendly link, Skej will scan the link for slots where you both have mutual availability and then put an appointment on your calendars.
“I’ve never met anyone in my life who likes to schedule meetings,” says Skej co-founder and CEO Paul Canetti.
The New York-based serial entrepreneur, who previously founded and sold code-free app development platform MAZ Systems, had also worked at another meeting startup called Bounce House. In this case, the service allowed people to pay to book time slots with professionals like yoga or piano teachers.
The same founding team from those previous efforts and others returned to work on Skej, including Canettimy brother JustinCTO Anindya Mondaland a fourth co-founder, Simon Baumer, who died of cancer three months after Skej was founded last August. (The team has a dedication page to Simon on Skej’s website, crediting him with creating the “core product today”.)
As Paul explains, Calendly is useful and has built an “incredible business,” he says, but he didn’t like to publicize every spare moment he had. The only time he was ever really satisfied with programming was when he had a human assistant, like EA. Unlike a technology platform, a human could easily understand the context around meetings and know whether to shuffle the calendar to fit someone important, even if they were scheduled as busy, for example. This led to the idea of creating an AI assistant that could do the same.
To use Skej, you don’t need to download an app or visit a website — just add their email address to your chat. Later, Skej will also have a phone number to add to text conversations. The service currently works with any email platform, including Gmail, Outlook, and more. It currently integrates with other programs as well, including Zoom and Google Calendar with support for Outlook Calendar coming in the coming weeks
Using Skej only requires you to add the email to your chat and then ask it to find meeting times in your reply. For example, when TechCrunch was scheduling an interview with Paul, he responded “Skej, can you offer some times that might work this week?” and the AI assistant emailed me options as well as a link to automatically connect my calendar to find an appointment. After responding with my preference, Skej responded that the meeting was set and added it to my calendar.
The system works because the user Skej — in this case, Paul — has allowed him to access his calendar. Skej was simply sending the calendar invite on his behalf.
However, if I had clicked on the included link, Skej could have automatically booked the meeting without any changes. This last option works best for internal groups where multiple people need to come together to find a time slot that works for everyone in the group.
Under the hood, Skej leverages different LLM models, including those to interpret language in email and then parse it into data fed into Skej’s proprietary system.
“We call it internally, the brain…and the Skej brain is like a scheduling engine, almost like a market for matching times,” says Paul. “So you can have different people in there, in different time zones, with different values and different conflicts and different preferences,” he continues. “And he’s trying to negotiate to find a match. Then… it spits out the match or suggested times or data, and an LLM helps create a natural-sounding message when it comes back,” notes Paul.
Skej also allows users to categorize different contacts to be associated with different calendars, such as your work calendar or your personal calendar. In time, Skej will be able to make this kind of categorization possible with natural language as well, Paul believes. For now, there is a more traditional control panel that you can use to set up your preferences and integrations.
One thing Skej doesn’t intend to do, however, is build an app.
“It’s funny, it’s a question we get a lot from VCs… it’s like, ‘well, eventually you’re going to have an app, right?'” says Paul. But Skej, he says, is meant to be “totally tool-agnostic that you already use and like, and can be adapted to any workflow you’ve already started,” he explains.
“It doesn’t force you into a certain application or a certain thing,” he adds.
Skej’s investors include Betaworks, Mozilla Ventures, Stem AI, Spice Capital, Deftly.vc and Differential Ventures. The round was just under a million, says Paul. Skej’s remotely distributed team includes the three co-founders and two other full-time engineers.
The service, now in public beta, is currently used by more than 1,000 users. Skej is free for now while the team collects feedback, but will add a paid tier later.
