Kais Khimji has spent most of his professional career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at the prominent VC firm Sequoia Capital.
But like several other former Sequoia partners, including David Vélez, who founded Brazilian digital bank Nubank, Kimji (pictured left) always wanted to be a startup founder. He announced Thursday that he has revived an idea he started working on as a student at Harvard University nearly a decade ago and reborn as Blockit, an AI calendar scheduling company. In a major vote of confidence, Kimji'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 is firmly on its way there,” Sequoia general partner and co-manager Pat Grady, who led the investment, said in a blog post.
While many startups have attempted to automate scheduling in the past, Khimji believes that thanks to advances in LLM, Blockit's AI agents can handle scheduling more seamlessly and efficiently than many of its predecessors, including now-defunct startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that domain name was adopted by Elon Musk's AI company.)
Unlike current category leader Calendly, which was last valued at $3 billion and relied on users sharing links to find availability, Blockit is betting that its AI agents can learn the nuances needed to handle the entire scheduling process without human involvement.
Kimji and co-founder John Hahn (previously worked on calendar products like Timeful, Google Calendar, and Clockwise) are using Blockit to essentially build 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 can't talk to each other,” Himji told TechCrunch.
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Khimji says Blockit can finally solve this disconnect. When two users need to meet, each AI agent will communicate directly to negotiate a time, completely avoiding the typical email back and forth.
Users can invoke the Blockit agent by copying it to an email or by messaging them about a meeting in Slack. The bot then takes over the logistics and negotiates a mutually convenient time and location to suit the preferences of all participants.
Kimji said Blockit can work 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 “modifiable” based on day-to-day needs. “Sometimes my calendar goes crazy and I have to skip lunch. Agents need to know that it's okay to skip lunch,” he said.
The system can also be trained to prioritize meetings based on email tone. For example, a user might instruct an agent to prioritize meeting requests signed with a formal “Nice to meet you” over casual interactions that end with “Cheers.”
Blockit appears to be leveraging what Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg, partners at venture firm Foundation Capital, call the “context graph” by learning users' preferences. In a widely shared essay, investors describe the multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents to capture the “why” behind every business decision by relying on hidden logic that previously existed only in human heads.
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 free for 30 days. After that, it costs $1,000 a year for an individual user and $5,000 a year for a team license that supports multiple users, Kimji said.