The End of Meeting Hell! Our Investment In Clockwise
Tags: Product Led Growth, Productivity, Bain Capital Ventures, Venture Capital, Startup

Gary (left) and Matt (right), Clockwise Co-founders

We are thrilled to announce that Bain Capital Ventures is leading the $18M Series B funding round in Clockwise, an intelligent calendar software that allows workers to take back control of their schedules. We are honored to be supporting Matt Martin, Gary Lerhaupt, and the rest of the Clockwise team alongside our fellow early-stage investors Accel and Greylock Partners.

No Time Like The Present

Companies and information workers are adopting product-led productivity-tools that leverage modern web technology to deliver superior user experience, collaboration, and automation. There are massive disruptions happening in every category of the traditional office suite through new, innovative solutions.

Rethinking and optimizing the calendar, in particular, represents a huge untapped opportunity. $37B is spent on unproductive meetings every year just in the United States, according to Inc. We all have daily stories of meetings that slow us down from getting meaningful work done, and the data proves it too. According to a recent HBR study, 64% of respondents across a range of industries said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.

The recent global shift to remote work has only perpetuated this phenomenon. Since the start of the pandemic Clockwise has seen a 29% increase in the amount of time spent in team-sync and other internal meetings. As a result, remote workers are searching for smart technology to streamline meetings and create space in their days for focused work.

This is where Clockwise comes in. Clockwise uses a context-aware optimization engine to create and protect Focus Time for users, including automated time blocking, conflict rescheduling, and status updates. As the first company to introduce the concept of flexible meeting times into the workplace, Clockwise has optimized more than 200,000 calendars since launching in 2019.

Schedules and the calendar can not only be optimized at an individual level but also at a team, function and company level. Today, Clockwise is also launching Clockwise for Teams, a product that will allow effortless communication and collaboration between teammates to make working together, especially in our remote working world, frictionless.

Strong Adoption By Employees And Teams

It’s no secret that Clockwise is loved by teams at Slack, Asana, Lyft, Twitter, and many others. When doing our initial diligence on the company, we decided to speak to current and prospective users at over 25 companies in our network to learn exactly why. Our conversations affirmed our conviction that Clockwise has built a robust set of features leading to word-of-mouth referral by peers and managers within companies.

A few of the positive reviews we heard from employees and teams in a diversity of roles, were:

“Before we discovered Clockwise, it was already getting bottoms-up traction and used here. Clockwise gave time back to people. There was a parallel trend where when more time was unlocked for people, the more code was written. The number of products we shipped increased. If we turned off Clockwise today, it would be a problem.” — Engineering

“The Director of Demand Generation introduced Clockwise. The entire go-to-market team has been using it since earlier this year. My favorite aspect is that Clockwise frees up blocks of time to speak to prospects and customers.” — Sales

“I try to schedule all of my meetings through Clockwise. My guess is that almost half of the company uses it. It grows by itself… The auto-rescheduling feature is great. Easily scheduling time is just awesome and it gives me a lot of decision points.” — Product

“I heard about Clockwise from some other colleagues who were using it. I feel the effect day-to-day… I think the adoption grew quite a bit in the past 3–4 months. Part of it is also because of working from home, people need more tools to manage their calendars more proactively.” — Business Development

Broadly, users appreciate the value of Focus Time and Clockwise’s features to expand it. Clockwise users also enthusiastically shared tactical ways they are saving time, ranging from utilizing the auto-rescheduling feature to supercharging Slack with Clockwise.

Innovative, Product-Obsessed Leadership

Matt and Gary first worked together as leaders on RelateIQ’s engineering team, which has a legendary reputation for being user-centric and product focused, with several talented team members going on to start compelling software companies. RelateIQ’s software, which challenged the traditional CRM model by leveraging the same conceptual data integrations (to contacts, calendars and email) that power Clockwise today, was acquired by Salesforce for $390M just three years in.

From the first time we met, we were inspired by Matt and Gary’s desire to build Clockwise into an enduring company with some of their learnings from RelateIQ. We knew right away that we had to find a way to partner with the team. As we spent more time with Matt and Gary, we were impressed by the team’s deeply-researched and thoughtfully prioritized product roadmap to reimagine workplace productivity.

Our team has been fortunate to serve on the boards of Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM), DocuSign (NASDAQ: DOCU), and Wrike over the years, and we believe that Clockwise, like these companies have done, is well positioned to unlock productivity gains for millions of workers.

We look forward to the journey ahead with Matt, Gary, and Team Clockwise. If you want to take back control of your day, we encourage you to get started with Clockwise for free today. And if you want to join the incredible and growing team, they are hiring!

-Ajay Agarwal, Kevin Zhang, and Steven Lee