Ele.me co-founder snags $11m for AI calendar app

There’s a cornucopia of cleverly designed productivity apps nowadays. But for some people, staying organized is easiest with a simple habit: texting themselves. 

Singapore-based AI firm Orion Arm is betting that many people prefer putting grocery lists or product pipeline plans into a chat box, not a calendar app. Its flagship product, the AI-powered calendar assistant Toki, lets users schedule events by texting them on chat apps like WhatsApp or Telegram.

The product quietly launched in mid-2024 – initially under the Dola brand – and has amassed 3 million registered users globally. That helped Orion Arm raise US$11 million at a US$100 million valuation this month. 

While investors are undisclosed, the company says that most are tech entrepreneurs rather than VC firms. According to the founders, the latter group balked at the valuation, since the startup is just starting to generate revenue.

Orion Arm has ambitious targets for what may seem like highly saturated categories – aside from Toki, it has a news app called Syft. These sectors are ripe for disruption – not just from other third-party apps but also from tech giants.

But Orion Arm, whose co-founder and CEO Raymond Wang led product and tech at Chinese food delivery app (and Alibaba acquiree) Ele.me, believes that speed, simplicity, and an optimized AI infrastructure behind familiar interfaces will lead to success.

Execute to win

“Most calendar apps like Google’s or Apple’s are designed for work,” Wang points out, whereas Toki is for “mainstream people.”

Wang co-founded Orion Arm with Robert Zheng and Haochuan Guo in May 2023. That was five years after Alibaba bought Ele.me in a US$9.5 billion deal. 

The trio set out to make time management more accessible, which led to the development of Toki.

Instead of navigating dropdowns and time selectors, Toki users can send a text message – or a screengrab of a flight ticket, for instance – via chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, or iMessage. The AI assistant parses the input and automatically creates an entry in the user’s preferred calendar platform.

When the time comes, Toki pings the user through their chat app of choice.

“Sherlocked”

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