Tempo AI Secures $10M in Series A Funding to Accelerate Tempo Smart Calendar’s Position as the Definitive Mobile Assistant

MENLO PARK, Calif. – June 20, 2013 – Today, Tempo AI, creator of the breakthrough personal productivity app, Tempo Smart Calendar , is announcing a $10 million Series A investment to advance its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The round, led by Relay Ventures and Sierra Ventures , is aimed at improving the app’s advanced AI and semantic learning machine to harness the massive quantities of calendar data and complex behavior patterns, creating personalized experiences that anticipate needs and complete tasks. To create a calendar that learns and improves with use, Tempo AI, an SRI International spin-off, leveraged AI research adjacent to the research that led to Siri.

The calendar is life’s uber-dashboard to the “who, what, where, when and why” of the actions in one’s day. Tempo Smart Calendar connects the dots by presenting all the information people need and then behaves like an assistant by making this information easily actionable right from the calendar. It was designed to be both beautiful and smart, saving time and eliminating hassles.

Common tasks are reduced to a single tap. Dial into conference calls, send a text when running late, check flight status or review an agenda—all without leaving the calendar. The new funding gives the Tempo team the ability to work on delivering solutions for more time-consuming tasks such as the complexities around scheduling meetings. Tempo AI could be used to enable attendees to know a person’s precise location and calculate arrival time when someone is late, suggest a location that’s midway between attendees or book more time when the schedule and travel time don’t add up. Tempo is already the number one calendar for many people and will eventually become their go-to mobile assistant.

“We’re on a mission to help people get more done by building a mobile assistant in the calendar that delights users with AI, picking up where Siri left off as the next evolution of assistants,” said Raj Singh, CEO of Tempo AI. “We enhance massive amounts of data, and the calendar serves as the perfect framework because it has real context. It knows you, what you’re doing, and where you’re going. This is the future of big data engineering—to push the AI down into the individual bits of your calendar.”

“Both the mobile calendar and the productivity category are just getting their first tastes of ‘smart.’ We think of AI as a layer across all apps, and Tempo is bringing it to the mobile calendar – from how we interact with it to what we expect,” said Kevin Talbot, co-founder and managing partner at Relay Ventures. “What got us excited is that the calendar is just the beginning. Tempo is the perfect platform to connect all of the disparate content we have buried in our phones, infer intent and ultimately help us ‘do’ more"

Tempo Smart Calendar , the company’s debut app, has seen tremendous traction since launching just four months ago. Tempo has applied AI to terabytes of data, including processing over 1 billion documents and enhancing over 100,000 unique conference call dial-in formats. It’s a learning machine constantly improving its results. With one in five users now using Tempo as their default calendar, and users opening the app five times per day on average, the company is able to learn from this data to better understand, even anticipate, the actions most commonly made around meetings and calendar events.

Tempo AI has built a seasoned team of specialists from across the machine learning, artificial intelligence, and semantic search domains to tackle the computational challenges unique to assistant technologies. Kevin Talbot, Ben Yu, managing director of Sierra Ventures, and Norman Winarsky, vice president of SRI Ventures, have joined Tempo AI’s Board of Directors. Winarsky is a leading authority on virtual personal assistant technology and was a co-founder and board member of Siri, an SRI spin-off company acquired by Apple in April 2010.

In addition to Relay Ventures and Sierra Ventures, this round includes participation from Tempo’s previous investors in its $2.5M seed round, which was also led by Relay Ventures. These investors include Mayfield Fund, Horizon Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, SingTel Innov8, Miramar Venture Partners, SRI International, Golden Venture Partners, Seavest Capital Partners, ENIAC Ventures, as well as angel investors Gaurav Garg (formerly of Sequoia Capital) and Peter Wagner (formerly of Accel Partners).
 
Download Tempo Smart Calendar for free from the Apple App Store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tempo-smart-calendar/id593819390?mt=8

About Tempo AI
Tempo Smart Calendar leverages SRI International’s immense investment in artificial intelligence research and semantic technology. For decades, SRI International has pioneered technological advancements that are part of our daily lives, including the mouse, interactive computing, the Internet and more recently, Siri. Tempo is the newest breakthrough virtual personal assistant that fundamentally changes the way people manage their day. Like a personal assistant, the app anticipates relevant information and surfaces the information right in the calendar when you need it most. By eliminating the need to use multiple apps to cull relevant emails, find contact information, notify attendees if you’re running late or get directions to your next event, Tempo makes tackling the day as easy as one tap.

About SRI International
Innovations from SRI International have created new industries, billions of dollars of marketplace value, and lasting benefits to society—touching our lives every day. SRI, a nonprofit research and development institute based in Silicon Valley, brings its innovations to the marketplace through technology licensing, new products, and spin-off ventures. Government and business clients come to SRI for pioneering R&D and solutions in computing and communications, chemistry and materials, education, energy, health and pharmaceuticals, national defense, robotics, sensing, and more. Visit sri.com for more information.

About Relay Ventures
Relay Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in passionate entrepreneurs disrupting and creating new markets through mobile technologies. Unlike other funds, Relay exclusively focuses on software for mobile devices and the connected Internet, creating an unparalleled set of networks and resources that tangibly help founders build world-class companies. With offices in Menlo Park and Toronto, the firm is active throughout North America. For additional information, visit Relay Ventures . 

About Sierra Ventures
Since 1982, Sierra has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs around the world begin and grow successful technology companies. Our passion is finding the right combination of investment and expertise to help companies grow and deliver on their promise. Together with our vast network of consultants, attorneys, recruiters, leasing partners and investment bankers, let us help you build the next great technology company. Visit Sierra Ventures for more information.

Media Contacts

 Bob Patterson
VSCpr for Tempo AI1
(415) 302-9806
Bob@vscpr.com

Jodi Echakowitz
Echo Communications (for Relay Ventures)
1(905) 709-9600
jodi@relayventures.com

Alissa Bushnell
104 West Partners (for Sierra Ventures)
1(415) 235-9532
alissa.bushnell@104west.com

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VSCpr for Tempo AI

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