A new startup from a former Sequoia partner uses AI to negotiate your calendar.

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

But like previous Sequoia partners, including David Vélez, who founded Brazilian digital bank Nubank, Khimji (pictured left) always wanted to be a startup founder. On Thursday, he announced that he had revived an idea he started about a decade ago as a Harvard student into Blockit, an AI calendar scheduling company. In a major vote of confidence, Khimji’s former employer Sequoia led the company’s $5 million seed round.

“Blockit has the opportunity to become a $1 billion-plus revenue business, and Kais is certain to achieve that,” Pat Grady, Sequoia’s general partner and co-manager who led the investment, wrote in a blog post.

While many startups have attempted to automate scheduling in the past, Khimji believes LLM’s advancements allow Blockit’s AI agent to handle scheduling more smoothly and efficiently than many of its predecessors, including now-defunct startups Clara Labs and x.ai. (Yes, that domain name eventually ended up in Elon Musk’s AI company.)

Unlike current category leader Calendly, which was ultimately valued at $3 billion and relies on user-shared links to find availability, Blockit is confident its AI agents can master the nuances needed to handle the entire scheduling process without human intervention.

With Blockit, Khimji and co-founder John Hahn, who previously developed calendar products including Timeful, Google Calendar, and Clockwise, are essentially building an AI social network for people’s 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 Blockit can finally solve this disconnect. When two users need to meet, each AI agent negotiates time by communicating directly, completely bypassing the typical back-and-forth email.

Users can call the Blockit agent by copying it to their email or sending a message to Slack about the meeting. The bot then takes over the logistics, negotiating a mutually convenient time and location that suits the preferences of all participants.

Khimji said Blockit can work seamlessly like a human assistant. Users simply need to provide the system with specific instructions about their preferences, including non-negotiable meetings and “portable” meetings based on their daily needs. “Sometimes schedules are weird and you have to skip lunch, and agents need to know that it’s okay to skip lunch,” he said.

You can even teach the system to prioritize meetings based on the tone of your emails. For example, users can instruct agents that meeting requests formally signed with “hello” should take precedence over casual conversations that end with “cheers.”

Blockit appears to be leveraging what Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg, partners at venture firm Foundation Capital, call a “context graph” by learning users’ preferences. In a widely shared essay, investors describe a multibillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents to capture the “why” behind every business decision by relying on hidden logic that previously only existed in human heads.

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