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Clockwise’s $18M Series B Will Help Your Calendar Be Smarter

Bolstered by an $18 million funding round, San Francisco-based startup Clockwise is hoping to remove the busywork involved in scheduling by using artificial intelligence to help people get a dedicated block of time to be productive.

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Bain Capital Ventures led Clockwise’s $18 million Series B round of funding, joined by existing investors, Accel and Greylock Partners. The investment, announced Tuesday, brings the 4-year-old company’s total funding raised to $31.6 million, which includes an $11.3 million Series A in June 2019.

“What we saw was the difficulty of people being able to get that time,” Matt Martin, Clockwise co-founder and CEO told Crunchbase News. “I would see colleagues in the coffee shop and ask why they weren’t working at the office. They told me they needed to be able to focus, but people kept grabbing them for a meeting. I took that and created Clockwise, which began as an intelligent assistant to help them make time, not be double-booked and be heads down at a time they preferred.”

As part of the investment, Bain’s Ajay Agarwal joins Clockwise’s board of directors.

“In a business world increasingly reliant on the productivity of information workers, Clockwise delivers significant time savings to individuals, teams, functions and organizations,” Agarwal said in a written statement. “Over the past several months, Clockwise has seen material acceleration in their user growth as remote workers search for smart technology to streamline meetings and create necessary space in their days, and employers simultaneously address the urgent need to analyze time spent.”

Clockwise screenshot showing team analytics.

Clockwise was co-founded by Martin, Mike Grinolds and Gary Lerhaupt to encourage more “focus time,” often a two-hour block of time in which it takes the average person to get “in the zone.”

Since launching its calendar product a year ago, Clockwise has optimized more than 200,000 calendars for workers at companies like Slack, Asana and Spotify, Martin said.

So far, Clockwise’s funding raises have gone toward attracting talent, and the Series B is no different, Martin said. The company has 20 employees and would like to add 10 by the end of the year to meet demand.

“We also plan on hiring into next year, including early sales and building out a product team and support, as well as engineering design as we expand the rate of adoption,” Martin said.

In addition to the Series B, the company unveiled its new offering, Clockwise for Teams, which was developed to help companies keep teams connected as more people began working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the beginning of 2020, there has been an 87 percent growth in signups. The product includes a team calendar and analytics.

Said Martin, “We want to help people make time for what matters.”

Photos courtesy of Clockwise. From left, Clockwise co-founders Gary Lerhaupt and Matt Martin. Photo by Gary Sexton.
Blogroll illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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