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.<\/p>\n
But just like several other former Sequoia partners \u2014 including David V\u00e9lez, who founded the Brazilian digital bank Nubank \u2014 Khimji (pictured left) has always wanted to be a startup founder. On Thursday, he announced that he has revived an idea he began working on as a student at Harvard about 10 years ago, turning it into the AI calendar-scheduling company Blockit. In a major vote of confidence, Khimji\u2019s former employer, Sequoia, led the company\u2019s $5 million seed round.<\/p>\n
\u201cBlockit has a chance to become a $1Bn+ revenue business, and Kais will make sure it gets there,\u201d Pat Grady, Sequoia\u2019s general partner and co-steward who led the investment, wrote in a blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n While many startups have tried to automate scheduling in the past, Khimji believes that thanks to advances in LLMs, Blockit\u2019s AI agents can handle scheduling more seamlessly and efficiently than many of its predecessors, including now-defunct startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that domain name ended up with Elon Musk\u2019s AI company.)<\/p>\n Unlike the current category leader Calendly, which was last valued at $3 billion<\/a> and 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.<\/p>\n With Blockit, Khimji and co-founder John Hahn \u2014 who previously worked on calendar products, including Timeful, Google Calendar, and Clockwise \u2014 are building what is essentially an AI social network for people\u2019s time.<\/p>\n \u201cIt always felt very odd. I have a time database \u2014 my calendar. You have a time database \u2014 your calendar, and our databases just can\u2019t talk to each other,\u201d Khimji told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco Khimji says that Blockit can finally solve this disconnection. When two users need to meet, their respective AI agents communicate directly to negotiate a time, bypassing the typical back-and-forth emails entirely.<\/p>\n Users can invoke the Blockit agent by copying it on an email or messaging it in Slack about a meeting. The bot then takes over the logistics, negotiating a mutually convenient time and location that fits the preferences of all participants.<\/p>\n Khimji said that Blockit can work as seamlessly as a human executive assistant. Users simply need to provide the system with specific instructions about their preferences, such as which meetings are nonnegotiable and which are \u201cmovable\u201d based on daily needs. \u201cSometimes my calendar is crazy, so I need to skip lunch, and the agent needs to know that it\u2019s okay to skip lunch,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The system can even be trained to prioritize meetings based on the tone of an email. For instance, a user might instruct the agent that a meeting request signed with a formal \u201cBest regards\u201d should take precedence over a casual interaction ending with \u201cCheers.\u201d<\/p>\n By learning the preferences of its users, Blockit appears to be capitalizing on what venture firm Foundation Capital\u2019s partners Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg call \u201ccontext graphs.\u201d In a widely shared essay<\/a>, the investors describe a multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents to capture the \u201cwhy\u201d behind every business decision by relying on the hidden logic that previously only existed in a person\u2019s head.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n