Clockwise
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Clockwise CEO Matt Martin: How we closed an $18M Series B during a pandemic
Matt Martin is CEO and co-founder of Clockwise, a San Francisco-based software company.
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It all started with an email from a customer: “Do you know why Bain Capital Ventures is reaching out to me about Clockwise?”
That email would mark the beginning of a journey toward closing $18 million in new funding that will dramatically accelerate my company, Clockwise . It would require getting to know a partner in lockdown, long nights assembling a pitch deck and many bleary-eyed Zoom calls with some of the best VCs in the world.
Here’s how Ajay Agarwal from Bain Capital Ventures and I established trust online, how I made high-stakes decisions in extreme economic uncertainty and how we were able to turn the pandemic’s constraints into opportunities.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Building momentum: 2016 to 2020
Clockwise was founded in late fall of 2016. We realized that, as personal as time is, our schedules inside modern work environments are intertwined by a network of calendar events and attendees. People schedule meetings without considering the preferences of colleagues by simply hunting for any available “white space” (read: time to do real work). The net effect is that our most valuable resource, time, is easy to take and almost impossible to protect.
More than two years later, in June of 2019, we launched Clockwise to the public. After years of experimentation and refinement, we delivered to the world an intelligent calendar assistant that frees up your time so you can focus on what matters. Workers soon confirmed our hunch that they’re hungry for a tool that gives them more productive hours in their day. Our rapid user growth carried throughout 2019.
By January of 2020, we were on fire. Since January 1, our user base has grown by more than 90%, expanding at a clip of well over 5% week-over-week. As people sought remote tools during shelter-in-place, our rate of growth accelerated even further.
Our growth, incredible team, top-tier existing investors (Accel and Greylock) and strong cash position meant we didn’t need to raise additional capital until the fall of 2020. While COVID-19 certainly sent shock waves through the community, I was in regular communication with a few highly engaged investors who still seemed eager to invest in the future of productivity. I felt cautiously confident more capital could wait.
But, you know, best-laid plans.
Establishing trust while sheltering in place
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Clockwise nabs $11M Series A to make your calendar smarter
Almost every organization, regardless of size, is inundated with meetings, so much so it’s often hard to find dedicated time to do actual work. Clockwise wants to change that by bringing machine learning to the calendar to help employees free up time. Today, it announced an $11 million Series A investment, and made the product, which had been in beta, generally available.
The round was co-led led by Greylock and Accel . Other investors included Slack Fund, Michael Ovitz, Ellen Levy, George Hu, Soraya Darabi, SV Angel and Jay Simons. The company has raised a total of $13 million.
Matt Martin, CEO and co-founder at Clockwise, says the company’s mission is to help employees make time for what matters, and they are doing that by applying machine learning to the calendar to free up blocks of time to concentrate on work. Calendars have tended to be pretty static, and this provides a way to bring a level of intelligence to automatically shift meetings to a better time when it makes sense.
After you download Clockwise you can set parameters for which meetings can be moved and which are set in stone, and other preferences. As Martin wrote in a blog post announcing the new tool, this gives employees “uninterrupted blocks of time to focus, think and innovate.” For now, it’s available for G Suite users.
Gif: Clockwise
You may think this is a one-trick pony that will be hard to scale, but Martin says in the past few months, Clockwise has recovered thousands of hours, and as they gain more data, the tool will get even more intelligent about meeting shifting.
Certainly his investors see the potential. John Lilly, who is leading the investment at Greylock, believes Clockwise is filling a huge unfilled need inside organizations. “Clockwise is focused on helping individuals and teams retake ownership of their time. This is not an easy feat — building the Clockwise product requires a sophisticated understanding of machine learning, user interaction and systems design breakthrough,” Lilly said.
Clockwise founders were part of the team at RelateIQ, a company Salesforce bought for $390 million in 2014. Since leaving RelateIQ they decided to put that experience to work on making the calendar more efficient.
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