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. Like several other former Sequoia partners, such as Nubank founder David Vélez, Khimji always wanted to be a startup founder. He recently announced the revival of an idea he began working on as a Harvard student about ten years ago, turning it into the AI calendar-scheduling company Blockit. In a major vote of confidence, his former employer, Sequoia, led the company’s five million dollar seed round. Sequoia general partner Pat Grady expressed strong belief in the venture, stating that Blockit has a chance to become a billion-dollar-plus revenue business and that Kais will ensure it gets there.
While many startups have tried to automate scheduling in the past, Khimji believes that advances in large language models allow Blockit’s AI agents to handle scheduling more seamlessly and efficiently than its predecessors, including now-defunct startups like Clara Labs and x.ai. Unlike the current category leader Calendly, which relies on users sharing links to find availability, Blockit is betting that its AI agents can master the nuance required to handle the entire scheduling process without human involvement.
Together with co-founder John Hahn, who previously worked on calendar products like Timeful, Google Calendar, and Clockwise, Khimji is building what is essentially an AI social network for people’s time. Khimji noted the odd disconnect that exists today: everyone has a time database in their calendar, but these databases cannot talk to each other. Blockit aims to solve this.
When two users need to meet, their respective Blockit AI agents communicate directly to negotiate a time, completely bypassing the typical back-and-forth emails. Users can invoke the agent by copying it on an email or messaging it in Slack. The bot then handles the logistics, finding a mutually convenient time and location based on user preferences.
Khimji says Blockit can work as seamlessly as a human executive assistant. Users provide the system with specific instructions about their preferences, such as which meetings are fixed and which can be moved based on daily needs. The system can even be trained to prioritize meetings based on contextual clues, like the tone of an email, giving precedence to a formal request over a casual one.
By learning user preferences, Blockit capitalizes on what some investors call “context graphs,” described as a multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents to capture the underlying reasoning behind business decisions. Blockit is already being used by more than two hundred companies, including AI startup Together.ai, fintech company Brex, robotics startup Rogo, and venture firms like a16z, Accel, and Index. The app is free for thirty days, after which it costs one thousand dollars annually for individual users and five thousand dollars annually for a team license.