Reclaim.ai, a Portland, Ore.-based startup that uses AI to help companies prioritize tasks and coordinate schedules with a calendar app, has been acquired by file management giant Dropbox.
More than 320,000 people across 43,000 companies use Reclaim, which launched in 2019. Customers include PagerDuty, Zapier, GitHub, and others.
Reclaim co-founders Patrick Lightbody and Henry Shapiro -- who will join Dropbox, along with around 25 colleagues -- wrote a blog post about the acquisition.
"We started Reclaim by focusing on the calendar because we believed - and still do - that it's perhaps the most critical system that individuals, teams, and companies have for both understanding what's being worked on, and for taking action," they wrote. "We also believe that it only gets better with increased intelligence, automation, and humanity."
They noted how Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston wrote a letter in 2018 that described a similar vision for a calendar that helped users create a to-do list based on its understanding of priorities.
With the emergence of generative AI and similar tools, Reclaim envisions automation taking its product to the next level.
From the blog post:
Imagine waking up to a schedule that has standing instructions for how your week should be prioritized. Reclaim is connected not only to your calendar, but to all the systems you use to capture your most important priorities and work, and is pattern-matching that against where you want to spend time.
And then, after receiving new guidance from your manager or a colleague about an urgent need, you're able to provide instructions about what you need and what action you want to take. You don't need to think about the downstream impact of that change, you don't need to figure out the math of how to make time for it, and you don't need to tweak a dozen variables to make it so. You just say it in your own words, and it happens.
Then lastly, imagine that change in direction, that small shift in effort, gets linked back to the systems where your projects and priorities live. This is a system where every ripple is felt, and where time and effort are constantly adapting and tuning themselves. And it should all happen as a byproduct of us just getting our work done.
Reclaim said it is not changing its product pricing or customer support "anytime soon."
The company had raised $9.5 million to date from investors including Yummy Ventures, Character, Flying Fish, Operator Partners, Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, and others.
Competitors include Clockwise, Calendly, and other calendar time-management tools.
Lightbody previously created and sold two software testing companies, and was one of the original contributors to Selenium, a framework for testing web apps. Shapiro was a founding product manager at multiple startups in the Portland area. The two previously worked together at New Relic.
Dropbox's recent acquisitions include paying $95 million for form management platform FormSwift in 2022. It also acquired document sharing startup DocSend and universal search company Command E in 2021.
