The startup, which is going on eight years old, has been somewhat off the radar for years. That focus for building in San Francisco is already a big change for Calendly. Notably, both are based in San Francisco - not Atlanta. And Patrick Moran - formerly of Quip and New Relic - is joining as Calendly’s first chief revenue officer. Two notable moves on that front are also being announced with the funding: Jeff Diana is coming on as chief people officer with a mission to double the company’s employee base. That will include building out its platform with more tools and integrations - it started with and still has a substantial R&D operation in Kiev, Ukraine - expanding its operations with more talent (it currently has around 200 employees and plans to double headcount), further business development and more. So while the secondary funding is going towards giving liquidity to existing investors and early employees, Awotona said the plan will be to use the primary capital to invest in the company’s business. The company last year made about $70 million annually in subscription revenues from its SaaS-based business model and seems confident that its aggregated revenues will not long from now get to $1 billion.
The army of business users from companies like Twilio, Zoom, and UCSF has been joined by teachers, contractors, entrepreneurs, and freelancers, the company says. Teachers and students meeting for a remote lesson? Those also need invitations for online meetings.Īnd so do sessions with therapists, virtual dinner parties, and even (where they can still happen) in-person meetings, which are often now happening with more timed precision and more record-keeping, to keep social distancing and potential contact tracing in better order.Ĭurrently, some 10 million of us are using Calendly for all of this on a monthly basis, with that number growing 1,180% last year. We may not be doing more traditional “business meetings” per week, but the number of meetings we now need to set up, has gone up.Īll of the serendipitous and impromptu encounters we used to have around an office, or a neighborhood coffee shop, or the park? Those are now scheduled. And more recently, it has seen a boost, specifically in the last twelve months, as new Calendly users have emerged, as a result of how we are living. Calendly is already profitable, and it has been for years. The wide range of its use cases, and the virality of that growth strategy, have been winners. Its growth, meanwhile, has to date been based mostly around a very organic strategy: Calendly invites become links to Calendly itself, so people who use it and like it can (and do) start to use it, too.
350M OPENVIEW VENTURE ICONIQ 3B LUNDENTECHCRUNCH PRO
Pricing ranges from free (one calendar/one user/one event) to premium ($8/month) and pro ($12/month) for more calendars, events, integrations and features, with bigger packages for enterprises also available. It's a platform that provides a quick way to manage open spaces in your calendar for people to book appointments with you in those spaces, which then also books out the time in calendars like Google’s or Microsoft Outlook - with a growing number of tools to enhance that experience, including the ability to pay for a service in the event that your appointment is not a business meeting but, say, a yoga class. Not bad for a company that before now had raised just $550,000, including the life savings of the founder and CEO, Tope Awotona, to initially get off the ground.Ĭalendly is a freemium software-as-a-service, built around what is essentially a very simple piece of functionality. The funding round includes both primary and secondary money (slightly more of the latter than the former, from what I understand) and values the Atlanta-based startup at over $3 billion. Today comes news from a startup that has been a part of that trend: Calendly, a popular cloud-based service that people use to set up and confirm meeting times with others, has closed an investment of $350 million from OpenView Venture Partners and Iconiq. The “future of work” - cloud services, communications, productivity apps - has become “the way we work now.” And companies that have identified ways to help with this are seeing a boom. One big theme in tech right now is the rise of services to help us keep working through lockdowns, office closures, and other Covid-19 restrictions.
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