Nigerian-born Tope Awotona's cloud scheduling app, Calendly has partnered with Boston-based OpenView Venture Partners to invest $350 million into the platform, increasing its company valuation to $3 billion.
This company noted that they intend to use this fund to expand it's team and structure.
This is their first fundraising since an initial investment of $550,000 from Atlanta Ventures after it's launch in 2013.
The announcement of it's recent feat was made in an Instagram post captioned “We’re beyond excited to announce that @calendlyhq has closed a $350M Series B, led by OpenView”.
So far, Calendly has a large user base of some 30million subscribers.
The reason for the surge in its usage can be attributed to the now normal remote working culture.
In the past year, a new set of users, including health workers, teachers, contractors, entrepreneurs, and freelancers, have started using Calendly to schedule meetings.
Calendly was founded by Tope Awotona, who was born in Nigeria but moved to the US as a teenager.
Before he started working on Calendly, he tried to build a dating site which could’nt materialize due to lack of funds.
He later developed an e-commerce site selling projectors which also died soon because of low sales and a thin margin.
However, the determined Tope moved on to selling grills, a venture that suffered the same fate as the previous ones.
When he started Calendly, he had a tough time securing investment for the product.
“I raided my bank account and 401(k) to launch Calendly in 2013. Eventually, I ran out of money and started to seek VC funding. I had a working product, and customers using it, and everyone said no. Meanwhile, I watched other people who fit a different ‘profile’ get money thrown at them for shitty ideas. Those VCs were ignorant and shortsighted. The only thing I could attribute it to was that I was black.” ” He told Inc.
Currently, although the app platform may look like a platform that provides a quick way to manage open spaces in your calendar the company intends to has plans to plug in some new features and tools to improve customer experiences.