Kais Khimji has spent most of his professional career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at prominent VC firm Sequoia Capital.

But just like other former Sequoia partners—including David Velez, who founded Brazilian digital bank Nubank—Khimji (pictured left) has always wanted to be a startup founder. On Thursday, he announced that he has revived an idea he started working on nearly 10 years ago as a student at Harvard, turning it into the AI ​​calendar-scheduling company Blockit. In a big vote of confidence, Khimji’s former employer, Sequoia, led the company’s $5 million seed round.

“Blockkit has the opportunity to become a $1Bn+ revenue business, and Kais will ensure it gets there,” Pat Grady, Sequoia’s general partner and co-steward who led the investment, wrote in a Blog post.

While many startups have tried to automate scheduling in the past, Khimji believes that thanks to advances in LLM, Blockit’s AI agents can manage scheduling more seamlessly and efficiently than its predecessors, including now-defunct startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that domain name ended up with Elon Musk’s AI company.)

Unlike current category leader Calendly, which was priced last $3 billion And by relying on users sharing links to find availability, Blockit is betting that its AI agents can master the nuances needed to manage the entire scheduling process without human involvement.

With Blockit, Khimji and co-founder John Hahn, who previously worked on calendar products including Timeful, Google Calendar, and Clockwise, are building an AI social network essentially for human time.

“It always felt very strange. I have a time database—my calendar. You have a time database—your calendar, and our databases can’t talk to each other,” Khimji told TechCrunch.

Khimji says that Blockit may finally solve this disconnect. When two users need to meet, their respective AI agents communicate directly to discuss a time, bypassing normal emails entirely.

Users can call Blockit agents by copying them into an email or messaging Slack about the meeting. The bot then takes over the logistics, negotiating a mutually convenient time and location that fits the preferences of all participants.

Khimji said Blockit could work seamlessly as a human executive assistant. Users only need to provide the system with specific instructions about their preferences, such as which meetings are non-negotiable and which are “movable” based on daily needs. “Sometimes my calendar is crazy, so I have to skip lunch, and the agent needs to know that it’s okay to skip lunch,” she said.

The system can even be trained to prioritize meetings based on the tone of an email. For example, a user can instruct the agent that a meeting request signed with a formal “best wishes” should take precedence over a casual interaction ending with “cheers”.

By learning the preferences of its users, Blockit appears to be capitalizing on what Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg, partners at Foundation Capital, call the “context graph.” A Widely shared articleInvestors describe a multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents to capture the “why” behind every business decision that previously relied on hidden logic that existed only in a person’s head.

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