AI might not be as much as the duty of replacing Google Search just yet, but it might be useful in additional specific contexts — including handling the drudgery that comes with performing on a regular basis tasks, like scheduling meetings. That’s the premise behind the brand new startup, Skej, which offers an AI assistant you may loop into your emails to seek out the most effective time for everybody to satisfy.
Unlike other scheduling solutions, like Calendly, Skej doesn’t require you to flick thru someone’s availability to seek out a time to satisfy. In truth, if someone sends you a Calendly link, Skej will scan the link to seek out slots where each of you’ve gotten mutual availability after which put a gathering in your calendars.
“I’ve never met anyone in my life who loves scheduling meetings,” says Skej co-founder and CEO Paul Canetti.
The Recent York-based serial entrepreneur, who previously founded and sold no-code app development platform MAZ Systems, had also worked on one other meetings startup called Bounce House, sold to Declare Health, which rebranded it to Clickeasy.com, but has since shut down. Bounce House’s service allowed people to pay to book blocks of time with professionals like yoga or piano teachers.
The identical founding team from those former efforts and others returned to work on Skej, including Canetti, his brother Justin, CTO Anindya Mondal, and a fourth co-founder, Simon Baumer, who was lost to cancer three months after founding Skej last August. (The team has a tribute page to Simon on Skej’s website, crediting him with the creation of “the core of the product today.”)
As Paul explains, Calendly is helpful and has built an “incredible business,” he says, but he didn’t like publicizing every free time slot he had. The one time he was ever truly satisfied with scheduling was when he had a human assistant, like an EA. Unlike a tech platform, a human could easily understand the context around meetings and know whether to shuffle the calendar to slot in someone essential, even when you were scheduled as busy, for instance. That led to the thought of making an AI assistant that would do the identical.
To make use of Skej, you don’t must download an app or visit a web site — you just add its email address to your conversation. Later, Skej may also have a phone number so as to add to text chats, as well. The service today works with any email platform, like Gmail, Outlook and others. It currently integrates with other programs, too, like Zoom and Google Calendar, with support for Outlook Calendar coming in the subsequent few weeks.
Using Skej only requires you so as to add the e-mail to your conversation after which ask it to seek out times to satisfy in your reply. For instance, when TechCrunch was scheduling an interview with Paul, he replied “Skej, are you able to offer some times that may work this week?” and the AI assistant emailed me back with options in addition to a link to robotically connect my calendar to seek out a time. After replying with my preference, Skej replied the meeting was set and added it to my calendar.
The system works since the Skej user — on this case, Paul — has permitted it to access his calendar. Skej was simply sending the calendar invite on his behalf.
Had I clicked the included link, nonetheless, Skej could have robotically booked the meeting with none back-and-forth. This latter option works best for internal teams where many individuals have to come back together to seek out a time slot that works for everybody within the group.
Under the hood, Skej leverages different LLM models, including those to interpret the language in the e-mail and break it down into data that’s fed into Skej’s proprietary system.
“We call it internally, the brain…and the Skej brain is sort of a scheduling engine, almost like a marketplace for matching times,” Paul says. “So you may have different people in there, in several time zones, with different considerations and different conflicts and different preferences,” he continues. “And it’s attempting to negotiate to seek out a match. Then…it spits the match or suggested times or the information back out, and an LLM helps craft a message that sounds natural when it’s going back,” Paul notes.
Skej also allows users to categorize different contacts to be related to different calendars, like your work calendar or your personal calendar. In time, Skej will give you the option to make any such categorization possible with natural language, too, Paul believes. For now, there’s a more traditional dashboard you should use to establish your preferences and integrations.
One thing Skej doesn’t plan to do, nonetheless, is construct an app.
“It’s funny, it’s an issue we get from VCs rather a lot, too…it’s like, ‘well, eventually you’re gonna have an app, right?’,” says Paul. But Skej, he says, is supposed to be “totally agnostic to the tools that you just already use and like and it might adapt to whatever workflow you’ve already got occurring,” he explains.
“It’s not forcing you into a specific app or a specific thing,” he adds.
Skej’s pre-seed investors include Betaworks, Mozilla Ventures, Stem AI, Spice Capital, Deftly.vc and Differential Ventures. The round was just wanting 1,000,000, 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 getting used by greater than 1,000 users. Skej is free in the intervening time while the team collects feedback, but will later add a paid tier.
