MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Woven, a new company that brings advanced collaboration capabilities to existing calendar software to help busy people be more productive, today announced the launch of the Woven app, an intelligent calendar for busy professionals. Co-founded by former Facebook CIO Timothy Campos and Burc Arpat, a former engineering leader at Facebook and Google, Woven also announced $4.8 million in seed funding. The round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners, Felicis Ventures, and other individual investors.
“Time is our most valuable asset and yet it is critically underutilized,” said Tim Campos, Woven’s CEO. “We’ve long relied on the online calendar to help us allocate time, but it has essentially remained stagnant for a quarter of a century despite vast changes in how we work. Calendars are isolated, fragmented, cumbersome, and no longer suited for today’s busy, mobile workforce. The good news is we now have the capabilities – partly through AI – to transform how time is allocated by applying technology to create tools that are intelligent, collaborative, relevant, and content-oriented.”
“Tim and Burc are among the smartest minds in tech. At Facebook and Google, they both were intimately involved in driving workplace productivity to best-in-class levels – now, they’re doing the same thing for all of us by tackling time management more broadly,” said Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures. “Today’s launch of the Woven app is just the beginning of a complete re-think around scheduling, and using AI to dramatically improve productivity.”
The Woven App: Practical AI Weaves Together a Plan that Makes the Most of Users’ Time
Today, Woven launches its initial product, a calendar application also called Woven. The application, available on both mobile and web, manages time in an entirely new way. It pulls together every stage of the calendar lifecycle – planning, scheduling, preparation, meeting, and follow-up – and puts it into a smart and cohesive view. It uses AI and a rich calendar graph engine to create “weaves” or plans for how the user wants to spend his or her time. Weaves exist both before and after an event is scheduled, and they can connect any set of information, such as the user’s email messages, Google Docs, maps, and more, to an event. Multiple users can collaboratively edit a weave, which works with and extends existing calendaring systems such as G Suite and, in the future, Office 365.
“For calendars to make any real sense in today’s world, they need to be connected in ways that help people,” said Burc Arpat, Woven’s CTO. “We all use our calendars to do the same things: coordinate times with other people, know what meetings to prepare for, even plan how much time we need to spend in the car – yet our calendars don’t do all of this work for us – until now.”
Woven’s integration of AI leverages the team’s years of experience at Facebook and Google. The app can perform tasks automatically as well as on request. And Woven will continue to learn from each interaction, getting smarter to give users unparalleled insight into how they use time so that they can make adjustments according to priorities.
Whether it's scheduling a complex meeting or tracking what's important – at home or at work – the Woven app works to keep users productive and organized. Core features include:
- Maps: Woven visualizes calendar events on a map and automatically determines how much travel time is necessary between locations to help people plan their days. Woven can block time on the calendar to reserve time needed to travel to and from an event.
- Shared Scheduling: Woven users can collaborate on the time and location of events via any medium – e-mail, text, Slack, or other messaging platforms. Shared scheduling eliminates the back and forth of scheduling and helps everyone have access to relevant information before, during, and after meetings and events.
- Woven Assistant: Users can instruct Woven to find times and schedule meetings directly from e-mail with simple natural language. Just ask Woven to "Find times that will work for us next month for dinner" and Woven does the rest.
- My Time: The Woven app manages availability, scheduling activity, and event updates across both work and personal calendars to help avoid conflicts and enable people to better manage work and personal time.
“I'm always looking for ways to work more quickly and manage meetings more efficiently, and Woven made sense to me immediately,” said Mike Simonsen, founder and CEO, Altos Research. “Woven not only makes meeting collaboration easy, but dramatically improves my meeting follow-up as well. I've learned to depend on Map View to visualize my day in a way I never could before.”
“My biggest pain point in scheduling meetings with clients is being efficient with my time. I spend a significant amount of time suggesting times to each client and going back and forth. Woven has changed this for me, freeing up a measurable and useful amount of time in my own schedule for active client work,” said Anna Addoms, a small business owner in Denver, CO.
“Woven has created new ways to understand, visualize, and prioritize time, and we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do to automate the mundane and complement human intelligence,” added Campos. “The calendar of the future will not only help people manage their time more effectively, relieving stress and freeing them to concentrate on what matters, but it will help companies become more productive as well.”
The Woven app currently works with and extends Google Calendar, part of G Suite. To download the Woven app and add intelligence to your calendar, go to woven.com or download Woven from the iTunes App Store.
About Woven
Woven exists to reimagine how people use time so they can spend time on what matters most to them. Our vision starts with scheduling, but it extends well beyond that.
The Woven calendar makes shared scheduling much easier, a first step along the way to better managing your time. The app pulls together every stage of the calendar lifecycle – planning, scheduling, preparation, meeting, and follow-up – and puts it into a smart, cohesive view. It uses AI and a rich calendar graph engine to create “weaves”, or plans for how the user wants to spend her time. Weaves connect people collaboratively around an event, bringing together any set of information like emails, Google Docs, maps and more, adding enriched capabilities to existing calendaring systems like G Suite. Learn more at www.woven.com or download the Woven app now – it’s free.
