Kais Khimji has spent most of his skilled profession as a enterprise investor, including six years as a partner on the distinguished VC firm Sequoia Capital.
But similar to several other former Sequoia partners — including David Vélez, who founded the Brazilian digital bank Nubank — Khimji (pictured left) has all the time desired to be a startup founder. On Thursday, he announced that he has revived an idea he began working on as a student at Harvard about 10 years ago, turning it into the AI calendar-scheduling company Blockit. In a significant vote of confidence, Khimji’s former employer, Sequoia, led the corporate’s $5 million seed round.
“Blockit has a probability to grow to be a $1Bn+ revenue business, and Kais will be certain that it gets there,” Pat Grady, Sequoia’s general partner and co-steward who led the investment, wrote in a blog post.
While many startups have tried to automate scheduling previously, Khimji believes that because of advances in LLMs, Blockit’s AI agents can handle scheduling more seamlessly and efficiently than lots 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 the present category leader Calendly, which was last valued at $3 billion and relies on users sharing links to search out availability, Blockit is betting that its AI agents can master the nuance required to handle the complete 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 constructing what is actually an AI social network for people’s time.
“It all the time felt very odd. I actually have a time database — my calendar. You may have a time database — your calendar, and our databases just can’t refer to one another,” Khimji told TechCrunch.
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Khimji says that Blockit can finally solve this disconnection. When two users need to satisfy, their respective AI agents communicate directly to barter a time, bypassing the standard back-and-forth emails entirely.
Users can invoke the Blockit agent by copying it on an email or messaging it in Slack a couple of meeting. The bot then takes over the logistics, negotiating a mutually convenient time and site that matches the preferences of all participants.
Khimji said that Blockit can work as seamlessly as a human executive assistant. Users simply need to supply the system with specific instructions about their preferences, similar to which meetings are nonnegotiable and that are “movable” based on each day needs. “Sometimes my calendar is crazy, so I want to skip lunch, and the agent must know that it’s okay to skip lunch,” he said.
The system may even be trained to prioritize meetings based on the tone of an email. For example, a user might instruct the agent that a gathering request signed with a proper “Best regards” should take precedence over an off-the-cuff interaction ending with “Cheers.”
By learning the preferences of its users, Blockit appears to be capitalizing on what enterprise firm Foundation Capital’s partners Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg call “context graphs.” In a widely shared essay, the investors describe a multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents to capture the “why” behind every business decision by counting on the hidden logic that previously only existed in an individual’s head.
Blockit is already getting used by greater than 200 firms, including AI startup Together.ai, the newly acquired fintech company Brex, and robotics startup Rogo, in addition to enterprise firms a16z, Accel, and Index. The app is on the market totally free for 30 days. After that, it costs $1,000 annually for individual users and $5,000 annually for a team license with support for multiple users, Khimji said.