New funding: Portland, Ore.-based Reclaim.ai has raised $4.8 million in a seed funding round to help grow its calendar tool that uses machine learning and natural language processing to help users better manage their time. The startup launched in June 2019 and previously raised $1.5 million.
Timely time management: Effective time management has been an ongoing struggle for many people. Employees working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic have faced new challenges as they try to carve out focused hours for their most important tasks, putting aside distractions from family, pets and elsewhere. Reclaim helps people identify and prioritize essential tasks, account for their time, and coordinate schedules between workers. The product is being used by employees at more than 4,000 companies internationally.
Expansion plans: New funding will be used to grow the team of eight employees who work in Oregon and California. Reclaim aims to hire engineers, product managers and folks in sales. Reclaim is currently free through 2021 and pairs with Google Calendar. Support for Office 365 is coming soon.
The team: The initial Reclaim trio is co-founder and CEO Patrick Lightbody, co-founder Henry Shapiro and principal software engineer Ian White. The three previously worked together at Portland’s New Relic.
Lightbody has created and sold two companies in the software testing space, and was one of the original contributors to Selenium, a framework for testing web apps. Shapiro was a founding product manager at multiple startups in the Portland area. White has been a developer for 15 years.
Funding source: The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Gradient Ventures, Flying Fish, Operator Partners and Calendly. Other strategic investors include Jason Warner, CTO at Github; Sue Khim, CEO at Brilliant.org; Alex Solomon, co-founder and CTO at PagerDuty; Kenny Van Zant, former head of business at Asana; and Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO at Puppet.
