Meet Hera, a new calendar app that wants to turn the calendar into the main work interface. Hera helps you schedule meetings more easily with natural language processing and lets you share availabilities in an email or any messaging app. The startup is also going to build integrations with your other work tools so that you can surface important information before a meeting and extract information after a meeting.
So far, Hera has raised a $465,000 (€400,000) pre-seed round led by Eurazeo (under the Idinvest brand at the time) and several business angels. It has then joined Y Combinator’s S21 batch and raised a $1.7 million seed round led by Eurazeo.
Business angels who invested in the company include Alexis Bonillo, Thibaud Elzière, Kyle Parrish, Calvin French-Owen, John Gabaix and Karthik Puvvada. Notion Capital and Kima Ventures also invested.
Hera first started as a calendar app focused on note-taking during meetings. Since attending Y Combinator, the product has evolved quite a lot. It is now focused on managing the entire lifecycle of an event for busy people who manage a lot of (virtual) meetings.
First, Hera can help you schedule a meeting and get ready for a meeting. In just a few clicks, you can select multiple slots. Hera then generates a friendly text that you can copy and paste in an email thread, in a WhatsApp conversation or wherever you’re talking about your next meeting.
This is a much friendlier interface for the person receiving the message compared to traditional meeting scheduling tools. You don’t have to generate a link, and the person on the other end doesn’t have to click on a link to find out when this meeting could take place.
Image Credits: Hera
Second, Hera is going to pull context about your upcoming meetings. Chances are you already have a ton of info about people you’re meeting with. You send and receive emails, you may use a CRM and you may be meeting several times a year.
“We’re not going to become a project management platform, we’re going to integrate with tools that you already use,” co-founder and CEO Bruno Vegreville told me.
Hera lets you take some notes before the meeting so that you don’t forget about something. During the meeting, you can add more notes and then export this data to your favorite note-taking app, such as Notion.
Image Credits: Hera
Right now, Hera works best for users who want to take Google Calendar to the next level. Up next, the company wants to add some multiplayer components. For instance, you can imagine better scheduling if both people are currently using Hera. You could also imagine mentioning other Hera users directly in your calendar to get feedback on a meeting.
Hera has been in private beta for the past few months. The startup’s vision is quite clear. Some productivity tools, such as Superhuman, have made people more efficient when it comes to sorting threads and acting on incoming emails. If you consider meetings as threads, Hera could become the Superhuman of calendars.
Image Credits: Hera