USD 1 million for smart productivity calendar

The Morgen platform integrates leading calendars and apps allowing users to manage professional and personal time management and task coordination. The startup has raised USD1 million in pre-seed funding led by VI Partners.

With the rise in remote and asynchronistic work, side gigs and global teams, time management has grown increasingly complex. A flood of productivity tools has left people shuffling between apps, all promising timesaving. Co-founders Markus Gross (established entrepreneur, Chief Scientist of Disney Studios and professor at ETH Zurich), Marco Ancona and David Tedaldi established Morgen (originally MineTime) to provide a platform that allows individuals to manage all aspects of their time in one place instead of shuffling between multiple productivity tools and apps. The ETH spinoff and its team of five people aim to disrupt time management, challenging major players like Calendly, Todoist and long-established calendar providers.

At its core, the Morgen platform is an AI-powered calendar equipped with task planning and tracking, scheduling, and event management. Morgen integrates with leading apps and calendars (including Outlook, Google and iCal and Todoist), allowing users to manage professional and personal calendars, task management apps, and scheduling through the Morgen interface.

The solution originates from CTO and co-founder Marco Ancona’s PhD research on AI in ETH Zurich’s Department of Computer Science. Ancona set out “to create an AI-powered calendar to help people save time. The prototype gained rapid traction.”

While bootstrapped, Morgen built a loyal and established user base, including thousands of paying subscribers. “Our power users (both on the free plan and subscribers) use Morgen more than 10 times per day on average. When users hit these usage levels, we see that they are using Morgen as their primary calendar and time management app”, says Brenna Donoghue, Head of Marketing at Morgen.

Braced for further growth
To accelerate growth, the company, which employs five people, has now closed its first investment round, raising CHF 1 million. Swiss VI Partners led the round, with participation from New Forge, and Angel investors including Cornelia Gut-Villa and Cyrill Osterwalder.

The capital injection will help Morgen accelerate product development with next-generation intelligence features that will provide personalized guidance for better time management. While other competitors use broad algorithms to plan users’ days for them, Morgen wants to empower users with a real understanding of how they spend their time and provide individualized recommendations to increase effectiveness. The platform is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, used in 143 countries. Android and iOS apps are in currently Beta, with release dates expected in August.

Olivier Laplace, Partner at VI Partners, led the financing round. “At VI Partners, we are passionate about the use of AI and data to increase talent productivity and wellbeing. We are convinced that Morgen’s innovative approach to time management will empower workers to take control of their time, better organizing all aspects of their professional and personal lives in line with what matters most to them.”

(Press release/RAN)