When the founders of Reclaim.ai started the company in 2020 their pitch about giving an artificial intelligence tool access to your calendar was a bit out there.
“Now it doesn’t sound as crazy,” said co-founder and CEO Patrick Lightbody.
The startup, which has doubled in size from a year ago, has been building on the momentum of generative AI since the buzzy technology hit the zeitgeist in late 2022.
The startup launched as a smart calendar app, but the founders have a much bigger vision. “We are not just a scheduler or calendar assistant. We want to be the brain of the enterprise and connect the dots on how executives think about the future for the next five to 10 years of the business,” said Lightbody. “That all needs to percolate down. Every job of leadership is taking those goals to martial actions so people can all move in that direction.”
The key to that is priorities, and someone’s priorities are reflected in the calendar.
Reclaim has built a tool that works with Google Calendar — Microsoft Outlook is coming soon — that also integrates with other business tools like Slack, Asana, Zoom and Jira. Users establish what their priorities are and can tell the tool to create meetings or habits and the tool will organize the calendar as needed.
On April 23, the company launched a new feature called Smart Meetings that takes scheduling up a level with the AI negotiating meeting times between multiple busy people. This was made possible in part through the advancements in large language models, or LLMs, which are key to generative AI.
Reclaim had already built AI that could achieve scheduling, what LLMs do is allow people to express in plain language their priorities and needs and then the tool can independently move items around on a calendar, said Lightbody. It can also send any needed notifications on those changes.
Thousands of users have jumped on the new tool, he said. The most prolific user is at a large publicly traded company who has 200 people reporting to them and they are trying to have regular one-on-ones and other quarterly meetings.
“We are doing the job of being that person’s assistant,” Lightbody said.
The excitement around AI has also boosted Reclaim’s go-to-market strategy. Companies now have their own initiatives, and importantly new budgets, to find AI to augment their own teams, said Lightbody. Now there are opportunities to sell within IT and HR departments to take advantage of, he said.
The company built the Smart Meetings and other features over the last year. Lightbody had been gearing up to raise a Series A round from investors early last year, but, as the funding landscape shifted he turned instead to existing backers.
About $3 million came in from those investors and Lightbody hired engineers to build out and scale features. He also hired a head of sales who has been strategic in shifting from a bottom-up sales strategy to one that is larger deals within companies.
Lightbody is now gearing up to pitch new investors on a Series A and expects the fuller product and latest traction to be helpful.
“We were able to defer (a Series A) because of the confidence of existing investors,” he said. “We have 13,000 paid customers and 200,000 active users. ... In the last six months we were able to put blueprints together to ink six figure deals. That is the story to take to an investor.”
Reclaim has 23 employees with about 40% in Portland and Oregon. The company has an office in CENTRL Office’s Eastside location.
