Woven Seed Stage

This is the Wovenpitch deck to raise a $4.8m seed round in 2019. They were acquired by Slack.

About

Woven visualizes calendar events on a map and automatically determines how much travel time is necessary between locations to help people plan their days. Woven can block time on the calendar to reserve time needed to travel to and from an event. Woven users can collaborate on the time and location of events via any medium – e-mail, text, Slack, or other messaging platforms. Shared scheduling eliminates the back-and-forth of scheduling and helps everyone have access to relevant information before, during, and after meetings and events.

When Tim Campos first approached VCs with his startup idea, he told them to talk him out of it. This is pretty hilarious, and frankly, the kind of thing investors would love to hear. You aren’t a little pussy. So long as you can stand the heat, it’s game on.

However, Campos isn’t a little guy. He was chief information officer at Facebook up to 2016. Still, he wanted to start something of his own. Along with Burc Arpat, former software engineering manager at Facebook, they founded Woven, an AI-powered calendar and scheduling platform. Because… everything needs “AI”.

Even while he was excited about the prospect of helping people manage their time, Campos said he stayed realistic. He was candid with VCs regarding his doubts about whether the product could succeed. The traditional calendar system that we use to manage our time is generally perceived as a drain because organizing meetings isn’t something most people enjoy doing, he said. Campos understood that it would be challenging to convince anybody to invest in a new calendar tool. I agree.

“This is probably a striking example where everybody’s going left, and I wanted to go right,” he said. “If I was leaving Facebook, I didn’t want to go do something that was small and trite. I wanted to do something impactful.” That’s the big energy vibe you want to communicate.

Ultimately, Campos thinks the combination of his transparency and his impressive résumé landed him an investor deal. “I think what they saw was that I was well aware of the challenges,” Campos said. “I also didn’t have hubris [about] what I’ve done in the past.” Investors know that there are risks, so being clear about them is actually a big positive. Most founders would think that this is counterintuitive. They would want to hide everything. That’s a mistake. There are monsters under the bed, so say Rumpelstiltskin.

Woven was built on Campos’ work at Facebook: When he was leading IT teams, he spent the first couple of years developing solutions for the company calendar. He noticed upstarts like Slack, BlueJeans, and videoconferencing platforms were disrupting a space that was previously dominated by corporate giants like Microsoft and Cisco, he said.

“Everybody cares about time,” Campos said. “We only have 24 hours in a day. It doesn’t matter if you’re Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Campos, or that you’re John Doe — everyone has 24 hours,” he said. “The decisions we make [in using that time] are the most valuable decisions we can make.”

Woven came out of stealth in 2018 and raised $4.8 million of seed funding, in a round led by Battery Ventures. The calendar platform makes shared scheduling easier by organizing the user experience in four stages: Planning, scheduling, preparation, meeting, and follow-up, the company shared. Woven allows you to coordinate directly with colleagues and has features like polls and automatic suggestions for meeting times. Woven recently introduced new design features to accommodate the growing remote workforce, Business Insider’s Paayal Zaveri reported. Some of the company’s competitors include Calendly and Timetrade, both online scheduling platforms that have also introduced new features during the pandemic.

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