Please welcome Undock, a lightning fast meeting experience
Meet Undock, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.
HQ: New York
Cofounders: Nash Lukman Ahmed, Lizelle van Vuuren, and David Altman
The problem: 2020 has meaningfully accelerated the move to remote work and distributed teams. With this shift has come a new opportunity for tech ecosystems to expand beyond coastal cities and into new regions both national and international. However, this move also necessitates new workflows and places stress on existing ways of working. Scheduling in particular has become further complicated as employees move to different time zones and have less visibility into each other’s daily schedules. Scheduling on its own is burdensome. Add new layers of friction caused by our fully remote world, and it becomes especially tedious.
Undock’s solution: Undock helps users instantly schedule, host and document video meetings. Using predictive scheduling, workers can simply type the “/” key within their outbound emails to see suggestions for mutually preferred meeting times across organizations, calendars, and time zones. Today Undock, which has raised $1.6 million in seed funding, launches its AI-powered meeting and calendar product for public beta.
Origin story: In 2018, Nash Ahmed sought to develop a way to schedule time more efficiently with the help of his college friend and fellow engineer, Dan Ross. David Altman, a growth and acquisition leader from Zynga, and Dima Kolodko, an engineer and software architect, joined Nash in his effort in 2019. This past July, Lizelle van Vuuren, a serial entrepreneur and Founder of Women Who Startup, completed the founding team to get Undock ready for primetime.
Why we’re betting on it: Nash has run multiple companies with teams distributed across the globe. If anyone understands the difficulties surrounding scheduling remote team members across different time zones, it’s him. AI tools and web technologies are now at a place where we can leverage software to improve process workflows and save time for workers. Nash and his team have done this by leveraging mature front-end frameworks and significant machine learning infrastructure. We’re incredibly confident that as network effects take hold for Undock, the company will continue to launch immensely helpful products to improve workforce productivity.
Our take: In our fully remote reality, it’s more important than ever for workers to schedule time with each other, both to foster collaboration and facilitate meaningful workplace culture. In order to ensure that time is spent actually connecting versus coordinating, products like Undock are going to be necessary to help seamlessly manage meetings. We’ve seen similar needs around team collaboration addressed in the market with some of our companies, including Clubhouse, Code Climate and Parsec For Teams. We’re excited for Undock to live within that stack and launch us into the next era of working.
Further reading: “Undock raises $1.6M to help solve your group scheduling nightmares” via TechCrunch.
Learn about careers at Undock.
