Magical, an Israeli startup, announced that it has raised a $3.3 million seed round to “reinvent the calendar experience from the ground up.” As reported by TechCrunch, the funding was led by Resolute Ventures, with additional backing from Ibex Investors, Aviv Growth Partners, ORR Partners, Homeward Ventures and Fusion LA, plus angel investors in the productivity space.
Magical, which is now in private beta, wants to integrate features from current scheduling and calendaring solutions, including AI-scheduling and automation tools. In their private beta sign-up form they specifically ask if users have scheduled meetings with “RescueTime, Superhuman, Reclaim.ai, Calendly, Zoom Chrome extension, Doodle, MixMax, or Clockwise.”
Image Credits: Magical, TechCrunch
According to founder and CEO Tommy Barav, “We want to redefine how you use a calendar in the first place. Many of the innovations that we’ve seen are associated with scheduling: how you schedule your time, letting you streamline the way you schedule meetings, how you see your calendar. But we’re talking about redefining time management by giving you a better calendar, by bringing these workflows — scheduling, coordinating and utilizing — into your calendar. We’re redefining the use of the calendar in the modern workspace.”
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Magical is working to provide the “power calendar user” with a tool that leverages the current calendar model. There have been multiple attempts to do this with one-off tools for many years, but so far, there has not been a solution that incorporated the calendar as the center of the user experience, which appears to be the Magical approach.
The funding lead Resolute Ventures’ mission is to “do something that matters” and seek out “passionate founders who aspire to do something bigger than build a successful business; they are chasing a dream.” We’d agree that this is a dream worth chasing, and that if someone can crack this problem on a grand scale it could change the way people work in a meaningful way.
Mike Hirshland, founding partner Resolute Ventures said “It’s rare that you find an entrepreneur who has so clearly validated its market opportunity. Tommy [Barav] and his team have been talking to thousands of users for three years, they’ve validated the opportunity, and they’ve designed a product from the ground-up that meets the needs of the market.”
Read the TechCrunch article here