Rise, the world’s smartest team calendar, raises $3M from Lachy Groom, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield and Adriaan Mol
The $3M round was led by Lachy Groom, from his third, $250M fund. Groom is an early investor in product focussed companies like Figma, Notion, WorkOS and Daily. Stewart Butterfield is the founder and CEO of Slack and operates at the forefront of reinventing work. Adriaan Mol (founder Mollie, Messagebird) is a brilliant builder of highly impactful products and companies. We are very excited to have them on board.
Lachy Groom:
“The team at Rise has been one of the few thinking deeply about how we manage time in teams and companies. I believe their unique approach could reshape how to get important work done. I’m really excited to be a part of this.”
Adriaan Mol:
“I’ve seen the previous challenges this team has tackled, and I’m very impressed by their combination of experience in design and product. There hasn’t been a lot innovation for calendars for a while now and I recognise the problems Rise wants to tackle and if anyone is able to crack it, it’s these guys.”
Why we need to get better at work
The modern worker is suffering from video conference fatigue and constant task switching. They are always on and hyperconnected. One billion knowledge workers* are able to spend just 39%* per week on their real work. No wonder we all feel like we’re in survival mode.
If we want to radically improve how we get things done, we need radically different solutions.
We are building a Scheduling Engine for teams
Rise is the world’s smartest team calendar. It’s like a personal assistant that helps you make drastically better decisions about how you spend your time. You’ll spend less time in meetings and have more time for focussed work.
Rise guards your time to focus, so your day doesn’t get filled up with meetings. And when it’s time to meet colleagues, it automatically finds the best time for everyone. Rise’s advanced Scheduling Engine combines hundreds of signals from individual calendars and work preferences with those of your colleagues. The engine is able to rank and select time slots that work best for all involved.
Rise’s Scheduling Engine takes into account at what times during the day your team members prefer their meetings. But also when they are at the office, how much time do they like in between meetings to regroup and much more. Once you’re used to our automatic Scheduling Engine, scheduling manually feels like going back in time.
The results are not guesswork with Rise Reports
We have early results of teams working with Rise that are looking really promising. On top of that we’ve built a feature called Rise Reports. With it, we are able to calculate the impact of using Rise as if everyone is using it.
Virtually running the Rise Scheduling Engine with a team of 60, we found we could win back 100 hours for the whole team every single week. Just by finding a better time for all existing meetings.
We’re bringing expert knowledge and product building skills
Rise’s vision is built on top of Rise’s co-founder, Rick Pastoor’s best-selling book GRIP (out in a couple of weeks, published by HarperCollins). Together with Emiel Janson (Blendle, Tidal) and Willem Spruijt (Uber, Yunoo) we have been working on the foundation of Rise for the past year.
Our investors are — without exception — experienced founders, operators and builders
Next to Lachy Groom, Stewart Butterfield and Adriaan Mol we are excited to have a long list of fantastic investors on board who all have been a huge help over the past couple of months getting to where we are now: Alexander Klöpping (Blendle), Jelle Prins (Uber), Robert Gaal (Quest, Google), Koen Bok (Framer, Facebook), Gloria Baeuerlein (Back), Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer, Uber), Tuomas Artman (Linear, Uber), Paul Veugen (Detail, Mapbox, Human), Kersvers, Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (The Next Web), Lucas Tieleman (Bazaarvoice), Robin van Dijke (Apple), Quintin Schevernels (Funda), Nick Lenten (Google), Duco van Lanschot (Fourthline, Stripe), Martijn de Kuijper (Twitter, Revue), Edial Dekker (Eventbrite, Gidsy) and Jasper Hauser (Darkroom, Facebook).
This is an exciting time for a product like ours. We believe we’re in the middle of a number of huge shifts in how we get work done: we all experience the lack of time to focus, and we’ve seen a glimpse of what can happen if we let go of existing ideas around work, the time we spend at work and from where we do that. Read more about what we believe in our manifest.
Want to join our team? That’s awesome. Find our open positions here.
