Raycast, a software program firm redefining productiveness, has raised a €27 million Sequence B funding spherical to scale back office context switching and enhance focus. European investor Atomico led the spherical, alongside participation from Accel, Coatue, Y Combinator, Atlassian Ventures, World Innovation Lab and notable angels Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Thomas Dohmke (CEO of GitHub) and Tobi Lütke (CEO of Shopify). As a part of this spherical, Atomico Associate Luca Eisenstecken will be part of Raycast’s board.
Because the Data Age transforms the way in which folks reside and work, the proliferation of software program instruments – which are supposed to improve productiveness and simplify lives – is in actual fact making work more and more advanced and fragmented. Data staff at the moment are always switching contexts between workflows and instruments, resulting in psychological overload and important productiveness loss. A 2022 Harvard Enterprise Evaluation (HBR) research of mid and back-office staff at Fortune 500 firms discovered that the “value” of every context change is about two seconds, with the common person toggling between totally different apps and web sites practically 1,200 occasions every day. Over a 12 months, this “toggle tax” added as much as 5 working weeks or 9% of annual time – misplaced time which damages productiveness and makes it laborious to maintain focus.
Raycast has been constructed to fight this digital fragmentation and assist folks obtain ‘Circulation’ – an idea central to its mission to assist information staff obtain an ideal state of productiveness. Performing as the last word shortcut to every part, its platform permits customers to work together with totally different apps with out absolutely switching contexts, enabling them to keep up a state of productive move. Over 1500 open-source extensions can be found to customers to benefit from apps like GitHub, Zoom and Notion with out dropping monitor of their ideas.
Thomas Paul Mann, CEO and co-founder of Raycast, mentioned: “Our mission in founding Raycast was to redefine how folks work together with their computer systems. We consider that reaching a state of ‘move’ is essential to productiveness and job satisfaction. Raycast isn’t nearly saving time – it’s about by no means losing it. By permitting customers to carry out actions like sending Slack messages, checking notifications, or anything with out even opening the app, we’re serving to folks keep targeted and accountable for their digital atmosphere.”
Since its launch in 2020, Raycast has change into the go-to device for software program engineers, product builders and designers, constructing a 22k-strong neighborhood of builders who use and construct on the device. In whole, Raycast has lots of of 1000’s of every day energetic customers for its Mac capabilities, and after important demand the corporate can also be right this moment asserting that they are going to be launching upcoming iOS and Home windows variations quickly with customers capable of register their curiosity from right this moment right here.
Luca Eisenstecken, Associate at Atomico, added: “Thomas and Petr have constructed an unimaginable product that solves an important downside not solely fantastically, but in addition successfully with a thriving open-source neighborhood of builders at its coronary heart. Raycast supplies customers with nearly limitless alternatives to construct a extremely personalised productiveness platform tailor-made to their distinctive workflows. I personally discover it indispensable for my every day work. That is additional underscored by the exceptional outcomes of our in-depth person analysis throughout due diligence, the place a staggering 98% of respondents reported a major improve of their Raycast utilization over the previous six months.”
Raycast’s platform is extremely straightforward and intuitive to make use of, with broad performance and repeatable instructions. That ease of use is amplified by the truth that it’s absolutely customisable – it integrates seamlessly with third-party extensions like Jira, GitHub, and Notion, alongside different generally used purposes resembling Translate, Spotify, Linear, Google Translate, YouTube, and ChatGPT. Many of those integrations have been constructed by Raycast’s neighborhood of twenty-two,000 builders.
Moreover, Raycast Professional, its AI-enhanced device acts as a singular AI that can work together with all a person’s instruments in pure language, and permit them to create and reuse their very own AI prompts, additional enhancing the move state by decreasing the necessity to context change even for AI interactions. The funding is being put in direction of investing in Raycast’s cross-platform imaginative and prescient, beginning with product growth in Home windows and iOS and redefining productiveness with AI, and can embrace a lot of key European hires throughout engineering, product and UX specialists in these platforms.
