Repetitive tasks are everywhere, putting a drag on our daily work productivity. According to a recent study of office workers, professionals spend about three hours a day on manual, repetitive computer tasks. And as expected, workers find these tasks boring and a poor use of their skills, reducing their overall productivity.
This is a problem space that I’m excited about. Prior to joining Greylock, I spent three years running Google Workspace, Google’s collaboration and productivity products. Our product and design teams were dedicated to improving the daily lives of billions of consumer and business users. We were constantly thinking about new AI-based features to make people more productive, including smart composition in Gmail, grammar suggestions in Google Docs, and automatically surfacing priority files in Google Drive.
At Greylock, we believe there continues to be boundless opportunities to make our lives easier and more productive at work. That’s why I am excited to share our investment in Magical, a company focused on empowering knowledge workers to automate their repetitive tasks so they get back to doing what they love. We have supported Magical since we led the seed round nearly two years ago, and have continued to support the team through the Series A, led by Coatue.
Magical started as a messaging tool that helps users quickly access their frequently used text and common phrases. The company has since expanded with a new feature set that moves data across websites and apps with just a simple keystroke, no integrations needed. Adding Magical to a workflow can greatly improve the day-to-day efficiency for workers in a range of job functions from sales to customer support to recruiting to IT.
Magical’s users already love the product, with over 2,000 positive ratings in the Chrome Store. Primarily through word of mouth, nearly half a million employees at thousands of companies, including Salesforce, Uber, Bolt, Disney, and Facebook, use Magical today. In fact, Magical users have already filled over one billion fields, and on average save about seven hours of work per week.
The Magical co-founders have strong roots building products that customers love. Harpaul Sambhi (CEO) previously founded Careerify, a recruiting tech company, which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2015. As executive sponsor of LinkedIn’s acquisition of Careerify, I had the privilege to work with Harpaul and his colleague Prashant Viswanathan (Head of Growth Engineering) for several years at LinkedIn. Zach Piepmeyer (Head of Design) also worked with us at LinkedIn, and Rosie Chopra (COO) previously ran strategy and business operations at Atlassian. Today, the Magical team is now nearly 20 people strong, with a talented team hailing from companies like Spotify, Uber, LinkedIn, and Mozilla.
As Magical comes out of stealth today, I encourage anyone who wants to save time on manual tasks to try it out, and see how many hours Magical can save you a week. And while we’re still in the early days, we think Magical’s functionality is just scratching the surface, with incredible potential to build a user-enabled robotic process automation (RPA) solution. We are excited to support the Magical team on this journey.
