He spent six years writing checks at Sequoia. Then he picked up a phone, made three announcements in one breath, and started building the thing he'd been sketching since freshman year.
San Francisco - CEO & Co-Founder, Blockit AI - Ex-Partner, Sequoia Capital
Most calendars are written in the same language and still can't understand each other. Kais Khimji noticed this in a Harvard dorm room around 2015, filed it under unsolved, and went off to do other things for a decade.
He went to Insight Partners. He went to Sequoia. He spent six years there, eventually as a partner, sitting in rooms with founders pitching the future of software while quietly mailing himself notes about a calendar problem that wouldn't quit.
"I have a time database - my calendar. You have a time database - your calendar, and our databases just can't talk to each other." That's the founding sentence of Blockit AI, the company he and co-founder John Han launched out of stealth in January 2026 with $5M led by Pat Grady at Sequoia. The shortest version: an AI agent that lives in email and Slack, hears a meeting request, and books the meeting. No Doodle poll. No three-day thread titled "Re: Re: Re: works for you?" No "looping in my assistant."
The product is the kind of thing every founder in the last fifteen years has tried to make work. Khimji's co-founder, John Han, personally tried it three times - he built calendar features at Timeful, Google Calendar, and Clockwise before coming back for one more swing. Calendar startups are where good founders go to be humbled. Blockit is the bet that the agent layer is the part that was missing.
Pat Grady, who led the seed, said Blockit "has a chance to become a $1Bn+ revenue business." On a calendar product. That sentence is itself a small fact about how the AI agent thesis has changed what people will underwrite.
"Persistent, not stubborn." - Aashay Sanghvi, Haystack, on Khimji
I have a time database. You have a time database. They just can't talk to each other.- Kais Khimji to TechCrunch, January 2026
Before Blockit was a company, before there was a logo or a price page, Khimji shipped a prototype to friends. One of them, Aashay Sanghvi at Haystack, was made to schedule with it. Aashay had, by his own admission, "substantial feedback." Khimji didn't argue. He went back and built more. The friendship survived. So did the idea.
When Khimji finally left Sequoia, he called his first outside investor and made three announcements in one breath: he was getting engaged, he was leaving Sequoia, and he was starting a company. The investor committed on the spot. Some pitches are about the deck. This one was about the cadence.
Among Blockit's paying customers: a16z, Accel, Index, and yes, Sequoia. The same people who fund Khimji also schedule with him. It's an unusual customer list - and a feedback loop he probably won't replicate twice in a career.
A three-time calendar veteran. Built at Timeful (acquired by Google). Then Google Calendar. Then Clockwise. The kind of resume that should make you skeptical of calendar startups - and curious about this one.
His first outside investor said yes during a phone call that also contained an engagement announcement and a resignation.
The same VC firms that funded Blockit - a16z, Accel, Index - use Blockit on their own calendars.
The product reads tone. A polite "happy to find a time" gets treated differently than "we need this on the books by Friday."
His Harvard major was Social Studies, focusing on Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Calendars turn out to be all three.
Pat Grady's underwriting line - "a chance to become a $1Bn+ revenue business" - is on a calendar app. Read that sentence twice.
Co-founder John Han has worked on three calendar products before this one. The phrase "founder graveyard" applies. He came back anyway.
The interesting thing about Blockit isn't that it schedules meetings. Lots of things schedule meetings. The interesting thing is that Khimji thinks the calendar is a missing protocol - the equivalent of email before SMTP, or payments before Stripe. A calendar entry is a tiny contract: who, when, where, why. Currently those contracts are negotiated by humans copying lines from one inbox into another. Blockit's bet is that the negotiation moves to agents and the contract stays.
That framing - "an AI social network for time" - is a Khimji line. It's also a tell. He doesn't talk about meeting scheduling. He talks about time, plural, as if everyone's calendar is a node in a graph and Blockit is the gossip layer. If that sounds grand for a tool that books coffees, it is. But it's the kind of grand that gets a Sequoia partner to leave the partner track.
What's verifiable so far: 200+ paying companies, including Brex, Together.ai, and Rogo. Pricing at $1,000/yr individual and $5,000/yr team. A team built from Retool, Waymo, and Notion alumni. A co-founder who has touched every previous serious attempt at solving this problem. And an investor base that uses the product, which is a quieter form of conviction than the term sheet.
What's still to be proven: whether agents can negotiate inside the messy social contract of work without irritating people more than the old system did. The polite calendar email exists for a reason - it's a soft place where humans hedge. An agent that says "Tuesday at 3, confirmed" without that hedge has to be very, very good at reading the room. Khimji thinks tone-detection is the unlock. The next twelve months will tell.
One more thing to notice. He named the company Blockit. Not Calendar.ai. Not Scheduler.something. Blockit - as in time-block, as in the protective act of carving an hour out of the chaos. The name doesn't promise more meetings. It promises fewer.