Portland-based time management startup Reclaim.ai raised $4.8 million from investors after the company saw larger than anticipated traction for its product last summer.
The round was led by Index Ventures and included Gradient Ventures, Flying Fish Partners, Operator Partners and Calendly. The team also brought in a series of strategic angel investors including Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO at Portland-based Puppet; Kenny Van Zant, head of business at Asana; Jason Warner, chief technology officer at Github; Sue Khim, CEO at Brilliant.org; and Alex Solomon, co-founder and chief technology officer at PagerDuty.
Reclaim, which launched last year, built an intelligent calendar assistant designed to help busy professionals sync personal and professional calendars, block time for personal and professional tasks and prioritize those tasks.
Initially the startup launched with two features in the first half of 2020 and by June it had several more features and more interest from users than it could keep up with, said co-founder and CEO Patrick Lightbody.
In addition to user interest the startup was receiving unsolicited calls from investors. The team wasn’t planning to raise anymore money, Lightbody said. However, the traction dictated otherwise. When the company launched it had already raised $1.5 million from friends and family and Seattle’s Flying Fish Partners.
“June the interest came in (from investors) and we were still a little cool on it,” Lightbody said. “As we dealt with sustaining the growth and thinking about what we could do with additional investment, that began to warm us up to it.”
With this latest capital the company has raised $6.3 million. The team structured the round to offer space for individual angels and angel collectives. It was this move that also allowed scheduling software maker Calendly to get involved as well.
Lightbody noted that the two companies are in complimentary areas and in fact it was working through some issues both companies faced with their integration to Google Calendar that started potential partnership talks between the two.
Reclaim’s product is used by more than 4,000 companies worldwide. It integrates with Google Calendar and an integration with Office 365 is in the works. The product is free for the remainder of this year, but will be a monthly subscription starting in 2022.
As a result of this funding the company has already grown the team to eight people, up from three a year ago. It has a few more openings for engineers.
For now Reclaim is an intelligent calendar utility, but Lightbody and co-founder Henry Shapiro see the startup as a broader platform for better time management for both individual employees and for organizations as well as prioritization of organizational goals.
The founders see Reclaim as eventually being the orchestration software that sits on top of many different business software tools and will be able to see where company priorities conflict or where bottlenecks are created in the organization. Today integrations are with the calendar applications and Slack but there can eventually be tie-ins with tools like Jira, Asana and Trello.
With teams increasingly remote, and likely to stay that way as companies adopt new hybrid offices models, tools such as this will be key, said investor Shardul Shah of Index Ventures in a written statement.
“Good time management and prioritization skills are becoming essential not just for individual professionals, but for teams and entire organizations as well,” he said. “Reclaim is poised to bring an entire generation of companies into a world where their priorities — not random meetings — determine how time gets spent.”
