A Cincinnati startup launched by two Fortune 100 veterans has raised millions in new funding from the top venture capital firm in the Midwest.
Scheduler AI in April closed a $2.8 million seed round led by Columbus-based Drive Capital. The amount includes the firm’s initial investment in the company dating back to 2022.
The startup is the brainchild of husband-and-wife team Mike and Maddie Bell, veterans of Nielsen and Procter & Gamble, respectively. They initially founded the company as Get Together AI in March 2021 to help working parents – like themselves – book times for gatherings, work meetings and appointments.
The goal was to build a "better Calendly,” Maddie Bell said. The concept has continued to evolve – especially at the enterprise level. It’s now a tool that helps businesses and customers connect in a matter of seconds.
The fresh funding will allow Scheduler to reach its next phase of growth, Maddie Bell told me, which includes the release of an artificial intelligence autopilot technology “the world has never seen.”
“For us, it really is a unique time to be building in this space,” she said. “It’s a large TAM (total addressable market). If you breathe oxygen and work with people, you have a scheduling problem. But AI is really positioned to win when it can handle meaningful meetings at scale.”
Scheduler, shortly after its launch, built out a “conversational” AI assistant that could help users sort through and route potential business leads, book (and reschedule) meetings, monitor calendars and coordinate followups across teams and platforms.
Bell said based on how they’ve seen people engage with AI, the team opted to dive into developing an autopilot offering – or an autopilot agent.
The autopilot agent will serve as a fully autonomous AI tool that can work across platforms to connect people and book meetings. In the case of Scheduler, the agent takes triggers and signals from internal systems (like customer relationship, or CRM, platforms such as Salesforce) to immediately engage people into conversations, discover intent and book them into meetings.
The AI can also reschedule meetings, transcribe meeting notes and auto book followup calls. There are currently a plethora of AI meeting note takers, Bell admits, “but they do absolutely nothing to push the conversation forward.”
The goal is to actually handle meeting workflows end-to-end.
“If you only remove 80% of the work from the human (when it comes to scheduling), and they're still responsible for managing 20% of it, you're not actually setting them free,” she said. “Rather than releasing another AI scheduling co-pilot, we started creating AI appointment-setting agents customized to you, to your business, to your goals.”
The move means the business has taken off “in a completely new and different way,” Maddie Bell said. Scheduler AI, for example, added $100,000 in incremental annual recurring revenue in a 90-day span.
The shift also set the stage for the most recent fundraise. The offering amount includes a new $2 million cash investment that came entirely from Drive, which ranks as the largest single venture capital firm in the Midwest with $2.2 billion under management.
“Meetings are a core growth driver for almost every business. But the playbooks, tech stacks and teams tasked with orchestrating these key meetings at scale are fractured,” Andy Jenks, partner at Drive Capital, said in an emailed statement to Cincy Inno. “Scheduler AI's patented ability to leverage context to connect the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons across platforms brings a fundamentally different – AI first – approach to how businesses connect and build profitable relationships with customers. We are thrilled to partner with them to help bring this new AI meeting orchestration platform to life.”
Maddie Bell declined to disclose the company’s new valuation. She said the team has continued to scale but remains lean. Currently, Scheduler AI employees work fully remote.
Staying small means the startup has the speed, agility and iteration ability that big firms historically don’t (Mike Bell left Nielsen in 2021, while Maddie exited P&G last year to help build Scheduler AI full-time). She said there’s sometimes a level of "paralyzing" corporate risk when it comes to building and launching new products – which could ultimately fall, publicly, flat on their face.
“But that's what AI needs,” she said. “It has almost an exponential growth curve. We’re able to solve for that risk without taking on the full weight. We’re able to have the room and space to figure it out.”
Cincy Inno named Scheduler AI one of its top 23 Startups to Watch in 2023, while Cincy Inno parent American Inno also ranked it among the top 35 AI Startups to Watch in the U.S.
