AI may not yet be up to the task of replacing Google Search, but it can be useful in more specific contexts, including handling the drudgery of completing everyday tasks, like scheduling meetings . That’s the idea behind new startup Skej, which offers an AI assistant you can check in your emails to find the best time for everyone to meet.
Unlike other scheduling solutions, like Calendly, Skej doesn’t require you to browse through someone’s availability to find an appointment time. In fact, if someone sends you a Calendly link, Skej will scan the link to find slots where you both have mutual availability, then put a meeting on your calendars.
“I’ve never met anyone in my life who loves planning meetings,” says Paul Canetti, co-founder and CEO of Skej.
The New York-based serial entrepreneur, who previously founded and sold no-code app development platform MAZ Systems, had also worked on another meetings startup called Bounce House. In this case, the service allowed people to pay to reserve time slots with professionals like yoga or piano teachers.
The same founding team from these earlier efforts and others returned to work on Skej, including Canetti, his brother Justin, CTO Anindya Mondal, and a fourth co-founder, Simon Baumer, who succumbed to cancer three months later having founded Skej last August. (The team has a tribute page to Simon on the Skej website, crediting him with creating the “core of the product today.”)
As Paul explains, Calendly is helpful and has built an “incredible business,” he says, but he didn’t like publicizing every free slot he had. The only time he was really happy with planning was when he had a human assistant, like an EA. Unlike a technology platform, a human could easily understand the context of meetings and whether to change the schedule to fit an important person in, even if you were busy, for example. This led to the idea of creating an AI assistant that could do the same.
To use Skej, you don’t need to download an app or visit a website: just add their email address to your conversation. Later, Skej will also have a phone number to add to text chats. The service works today with any email platform, like Gmail, Outlook and others. It currently integrates with other programs, like Zoom and Google Calendar, with support for Outlook Calendar coming in the coming weeks.
To use Skej, you only need to add the email to your conversation and then ask it to find meeting times in your reply. For example, when TechCrunch was scheduling an interview with Paul, he responded “Skej, can you suggest some schedules that might work this week?” ” and the AI assistant sent me an email back with options as well as a link to automatically connect my calendar to find a time. After responding with my preference, Skej responded that the meeting was set and added it to my calendar.
The system works because the user Skej – in this case, Paul – allowed him access to his calendar. Skej was simply sending the calendar invitation on his behalf.
If I had clicked on the included link, Skej could have automatically booked the meeting without any round trips. The latter option works best for internal teams where many people need to come together to find a time slot that works for everyone in the group.
Under the hood, Skej leverages different LLM models, including those to interpret the language in the email and then break it down into data that is fed into Skej’s proprietary system.
“We call it internally the brain…and the Skej brain is like a scheduling engine, almost like a marketplace for matching schedules,” Paul explains. “So you can have different people in there, in different time zones, with different considerations, different conflicts and different preferences,” he continues. “And he’s trying to negotiate to find a match. Then…it spits out the match, suggested times or data, and an LLM helps create a message that feels natural when it comes back,” notes Paul.
Skej also allows users to categorize different contacts to associate with different calendars, like your work calendar or your personal calendar. Over time, Skej will also be able to make this type of categorization possible with natural language, Paul believes. For now, there is a more traditional dashboard that you can use to configure your preferences and integrations.
However, one thing Skej has no plans to do is create an app.
“It’s funny, that’s also a question we get asked a lot by venture capitalists… it’s like, ‘Well, eventually you’ll have an app, right?’ “, explains Paul. But Skej, he says, is meant to be “completely independent of the tools you already use and love and can fit into any workflow you already have going,” he explains.
“It doesn’t force you to use any particular app or any particular thing,” he adds.
Skej’s pre-seed investors include Betaworks, Mozilla Ventures, Stem AI, Spice Capital, Deftly.vc and Differential Ventures. The round was just under a million short, Paul said. Skej’s remote distributed team includes the three co-founders and two other full-time engineers.
The service, now in public beta, is currently used by more than 1,000 users. Skej is free at the moment while the team collects feedback, but will add a paid tier later.
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