Over two years ago, we embarked on a mission to radically transform how people, teams, and companies manage their time. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve closed $4.8M in funding led by Index Ventures and co-led by a diverse group of incredible investors to help us accelerate and achieve this mission.

Reclaim didn’t emerge from a desire to simply make calendars better or make scheduling easier. It came from a central belief, informed by decades of life in the “middle-manager crunch”: that too often, our calendars end up pulling us away from the stuff that truly matters. We envisioned a future where your schedule was a reflection of your priorities across both work and life, not just an assortment of random meetings that continuously push your important work to late nights and weekends.

Today, that vision is still very much at the heart of our work, and we’re both amazed and endlessly grateful for the support, feedback, and engagement Reclaim has received from so many busy professionals across over 4,000 companies. 

This funding is just the beginning of our journey in many ways. Even before COVID tipped the scales toward cementing remote work as the “new normal”, companies were already starting to rethink how they enabled employees to balance work and life. Now, it’s clear that something needs to change to accommodate the new normal, and we believe that starts with how time is spent, prioritized, and managed.

Where we’ve been

We’re big believers in shipping fast and iterating quickly, and we’ve taken that approach in building Reclaim. “Big bang” releases are lots of fun, but they sometimes get in the way of delivering value to users quickly and learning from your mistakes.

To that end, Reclaim started initially as a very simple tool that enabled users to automatically sync events from their personal calendar to their work calendar (PSA: your coworkers can’t see events from any other calendars when they book time with you!), all while keeping the details of personal events discreet. We focused on this pain point because we knew from experience that it was truly a universal and straightforward problem -- and, we believed that before we could ask people to think about strategically rethinking their calendars, we had to help them get the basics under control.

Calendar Sync has evolved over time, enabling users to sync calendars in multiple directions across dozens of schedules, which not only supports the basic “work-life balance” need but also the needs of busy professionals with side gigs, consulting work, academic commitments, and so on.

After we launched Calendar Sync, we turned our attention to thinking about how we could better support people in getting time for their most important routines and to-dos. We knew from experience that time blocking isn’t as easy as filling your entire calendar up with “focus time” events -- if it were that easy, everyone would do it well!

The reality for many people with crazy calendars is that they simply don’t have the luxury to go heads-down 40 hours a week. They need to be available. They need to be collaborative. They need to make time for other priorities that enter their orbit. Simply put: they need to stay flexible, and it’s a big part of being successful in their jobs. 

When we built Habits and Tasks, we took this experience to heart. Instead of just building a feature that would add time blocks to your calendar and fill it up -- leaving very little room for collaboration or unexpected meetings -- we built an intelligent system that adapted and “flexed” to the schedule automatically.

In a nutshell, if you have lots of free time and flexibility, Reclaim adds your routines and tasks to your calendar but keeps the time free so that it doesn’t blockade schedulers. If your calendar is jam-packed, Reclaim adds time blocks as busy so that you still get time for what matters. It’s like having the best of both worlds -- without all the manual work.

Alongside these releases, we also launched Buffer Time and our Slack integration. Buffer Time helps you to get breaks between your meetings to decompress and travel, and our Slack integration and status sync helps you to get a break from all the notification fatigue you might be feeling when you’re at work.

Our most recent launch, Planner, brings it all together into a single interface where you can plan your week on-the-fly and rethink your entire schedule with one click. Core to our mission is the idea that your schedule should be a reflection of your true priorities, and Planner is the first major step in that direction.

We’re incredibly proud of what this team has done so far, and we’re grateful to our users for helping us to build an amazing foundation for the next generation of time management software. Since we launched our first feature in January 2020, Reclaim has:

• Synced more than 10 million events across calendars
• Blocked 2.4 million hours of time for our users' most important routines and tasks
• Provided nearly 300,000 post-Zoom breaks and 171,000 buffers to travel between meetings
• Updated 590,000 Slack statuses over 3 million hours of calendar events
• Saved users an average of 4.2 and up to 16 hours every week managing their schedules

Where we’re going next

Right now, Reclaim solely focuses on making time for the stuff that matters to you. For many busy professionals, this is already a major improvement to how they manage and defend their schedules. This next phase of growth will involve us bringing that functionality and power to entire teams and organizations.

Smart Meetings

Recurring meetings are one of the most common ways that calendars get slammed, and they’re typically where busy professionals look first when they’re trying to get some time back. One-on-ones are a particular breed of recurring meeting that is both prevalent and hard to optimize around your priorities. Too often, one-on-ones end up being scheduled in a way that prevents focus on your key objectives, and rescheduling them is a toilsome exercise that requires a lot of manual work.

Reclaim is working on Smart Meetings, which will essentially open up Habits to become multiplayer events. Want to get 30m a week to review marketing metrics with your VP of Marketing? Reclaim will find you mutual times that fit both your preferences automatically, and optimize that time around the work that matters.

Group Tasks

Within the same theme of group scheduling, we see tons of people struggling to find time for ad-hoc working sessions. Not only is it hard to find mutually available times (and keep them up-to-date when things change) but oftentimes for more intensive work, it’s important to split working sessions up across multiple events. 

Reclaim will soon be the place where you set up these kinds of working sessions across your team, and magically rebalance across schedules to find you the best times to get focused work done.

Integrations

We have thousands of requests for integrations with key project management and task platforms. As our users build their weekly planning routines around Reclaim, they’re hungry to sync the tasks and projects they already have in other sources of truth so they actually make time for their priorities. This year and early next, we intend to integrate with a half-dozen such products: Todoist, Trello, Asana, ClickUp, JIRA, and Linear.

Oh, and soon thereafter, we will also be adding support for Office365 / Outlook calendars ;) 

Did we mention we’re hiring?

Reclaim is a team of 8 passionate individuals who love what they do and care deeply about the mission to make people happier and more productive across work and life. To get to the next phase and beyond, we’re going to need a bigger boat.

Interested in joining us? Check out our postings here, and hit us up if you see something that catches your eye.

Thank you for making the last two years awesome. We can’t wait to share what’s coming next.

Yours in scheduling,
Patrick, Henry, Ian, Matt, Katie, Saxon, Kristi and Stevan