Calendars. They’re on the core of how we set up our workdays and conferences, however regardless of common makes an attempt to modernize the general calendar expertise, the calendar expertise you see as we speak in Outlook or G Suite Google Workspace hasn’t actually modified at its core. And for essentially the most half, the world that startups like Calendly or ReclaimAI have targeted on lately is scheduling.
Magical is a Tel Aviv-based startup that wishes to reinvent the calendar expertise from the bottom up and switch it into extra of a group collaboration device than merely a private time-management service. The corporate as we speak introduced that it has raised a $3.3 million seed spherical led by Resolute Ventures, with further backing from Ibex Buyers, Aviv Progress Companions, ORR Companions, Homeward Ventures and Fusion LA, in addition to a number of angel buyers within the productiveness house.
The concept for the service got here from discussions on Supertools, a big workplace-productivity group, which was additionally based by Magical founder and CEO Tommy Barav.
Based mostly on the suggestions from the group — and his personal consulting work with giant Fortune 500 multinationals — Barav realized that point administration stays an unsolved enterprise drawback. “The time administration house is so extremely fragmented,” he informed me. “There are such a lot of micro instruments and frameworks to handle time, however they’re not constructed within your calendar, which is the principle workflow.”
Conventional calendars are add-ons to larger product bundles and discover themselves trapped beneath these, he argues. “The calendar in Outlook is an e-mail sidekick, however it’s truly the middle of your day. So there may be an unmet want to make use of the calendar as a time administration hub,” he stated.
Magical, which continues to be in non-public beta, goals to combine lots of the options we’re seeing from present scheduling and calendaring startups, together with AI-scheduling and automation instruments. However Magical’s ambition is bigger than that.
“We need to redefine how you utilize a calendar within the first place,” Barav stated. “Lots of the improvements that we’ve seen are related to scheduling: the way you schedule your time, letting you streamline the best way you schedule conferences, the way you see your calendar. […] However we’re speaking about redefining time administration by supplying you with a greater calendar, by bringing these workflows — scheduling, coordinating and using — into your calendar. We’re redefining the usage of the calendar within the trendy workspace.”
Since Magical continues to be in its early days, the group continues to be understanding among the particulars, however the basic concept is to, for instance, flip the calendar into the central repository for assembly notes — and Magical will function instruments to collaborate on these notes and share them. Group members may even have the ability to comply with these assembly notes with out having to take part within the precise assembly (or get copied on the emails about that assembly).
“We’ll assist groups cut back pointless conferences,” Barav famous. To do that, the group can be integrating different service into the calendar expertise, together with the standard suspects like Zoom and Slack, but in addition Salesforce and Notion, for instance.
“It’s uncommon that you just discover an entrepreneur who has so clearly validated its market alternative,” stated Mike Hirshland, a founding associate of Magical investor Resolute Ventures. “Tommy and his group have been speaking to hundreds of customers for 3 years, they’ve validated the chance, and so they’ve designed a product from the ground-up that meets the wants of the market. Now it’s ‘go time’ and I’m thrilled to be a part of the journey forward.”
