Smart calendar tool Clockwise raises $45M to help remote teams avoid burnout using AI

Clockwise, a time management and smart calendar tool, has raised $45 million in Series C funding led by Coatue, with participation from Atlassian Ventures and existing investors Accel, Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. This latest round brings the company’s total amount of funding raised to $76 million. Clockwise uses artificial intelligence to help teams free up their workdays and avoid the challenges associated with remote and hybrid workplaces, such as burnout.

The company was founded in 2016 by Gary Lerhaupt, Matt Martin and Mike Grinolds. The trio met while working at RelateIQ, a company Salesforce bought for $390 million in 2014. They found that they shared a common goal, which was to create a way to give people more time for focused work.

“Clockwise is the solution to the modern workday,” Clockwise CEO Matt Martin told TechCrunch in an email. “Clockwise optimizes your team’s schedules to create more time in everyone’s day — so we can feel present when we’re working together and focused when we’re working on our own. We enable a new way of working that genuinely respects people’s time and helps create a healthy, sustainable future of work.”

Since the platform’s launch in 2019, Clockwise has rescheduled 4,000,000 flexible meetings. It has also created more than 2,000,000 hours of uninterrupted “Focus Time” for teams. Focus Time is a feature that helps users visualize how much time they have for focused work by automatically creating a block in their calendars. Clockwise has optimized calendars for more than 10,000 organizations, including Netflix, Twitter, Coinbase, Atlassian, Asana and Airtable.

Image Credits: Clockwise

Clockwise currently competes with several other smart calendar and scheduling tools such as Calendly, Doodle, Reclaim and more. Martin says Clockwise differs from other smart calendar platforms because the company is creating a new category it calls “time orchestration,” a modern way to bring schedules together at the organizational level.

“We’re in the early days of this category, so we mainly compete with people who don’t realize that their attempts to optimize their individual workday can negatively impact their teammates’ productivity,” he said. “The magic of Clockwise is that we orchestrate companies’ workdays, running up to one million calendar permutations for any given team to create the best possible schedule for everyone.”

Clockwise will use this latest investment to advance its AI technology and continue to bring its platform to more teams across the globe. The company is hiring across all of its departments, with 25 open positions and another 100 openings planned for this year.

In terms of the future, Martin says Clockwise will continue to grow and expand to find more ways to free up people’s workdays. He says although Clockwise is currently only designed to manage internal meetings, the platform could dramatically improve the broader scheduling experience in the future.

“We’re investing in advanced AI and ML models to both create Focus Time and power high-quality meetings,” Martin said. “Clockwise has a lot of exciting new products and enhancements ahead, including bringing this new way of working to the hundreds of millions of people using Microsoft 365.”

Clockwise’s Series C investment follows its $18 million Series B funding round announced in June 2020. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company announced its $11 million Series A investment, which was co-led led by Greylock and Accel, in June 2019.