Ex-Sequoia partner launches Blockit, an AI scheduling startup

Kais Khimji spent most of his career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at Sequoia Capital. Like several other former Sequoia partners — including David Vélez, who founded the Brazilian digital bank Nubank — Khimji wanted to build a startup of his own. He has now revived an idea he first worked on as a Harvard student about 10 years ago, turning it into Blockit, an AI calendar-scheduling company. Sequoia, his former employer, led the company’s $5 million seed round.

Sequoia general partner Pat Grady, who led the investment, said in a blog post that Blockit has a chance to become a business generating more than $1 billion in revenue, with Khimji driving it there. Many startups have tried to automate scheduling before, including the now-defunct Clara Labs and x.ai — whose domain now belongs to Elon Musk’s AI company — but Khimji believes advances in large language models let Blockit’s AI agents handle scheduling more seamlessly than its predecessors. Unlike category leader Calendly, last valued at $3 billion, which relies on users sharing availability links, Blockit is betting its agents can handle the entire scheduling process without human involvement.

Khimji and co-founder John Han, who previously worked on calendar products including Timeful, Google Calendar, and Clockwise, are building what Khimji calls an AI social network for people’s time. “It always felt very odd. I have a time database — my calendar. You have a time database — your calendar, and our databases just can’t talk to each other,” Khimji told TechCrunch. Users invoke Blockit’s agent by copying it on an email or messaging it in Slack about a meeting; the agent then negotiates a mutually convenient time and location based on each participant’s preferences, including instructions on which meetings are nonnegotiable versus movable, and can even weigh the tone of a request — treating a formal “Best regards” sign-off differently from a casual “Cheers.”

Blockit is already used by more than 200 companies, including AI startup Together.ai, recently acquired fintech company Brex, and robotics startup Rogo, as well as venture firms a16z, Accel, and Index. The app is free for 30 days, after which it costs $1,000 annually for individual users and $5,000 annually for a team license supporting multiple users.

Why it matters

Blockit’s bet reflects a broader shift investors are watching: AI agents that don’t just automate a task but capture the informal context — preferences, priorities, relationships — that previously lived only in a person’s head, a shift Foundation Capital has called the rise of “context graphs.”