Raycast, a software company redefining productivity, has raised a €27 million Series B funding round to reduce workplace context switching and improve focus. European investor Atomico led the round, 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 part of this round, Atomico Partner Luca Eisenstecken will join Raycast’s board.
As the Information Age transforms the way people live and work, the proliferation of software tools – which are meant to increase productivity and simplify lives – is in fact making work increasingly complex and fragmented. Knowledge workers are now constantly switching contexts between workflows and tools, leading to mental overload and significant productivity loss. A 2022 Harvard Business Review (HBR) study of mid and back-office workers at Fortune 500 companies found that the “cost” of each context switch is about two seconds, with the average user toggling between different apps and websites nearly 1,200 times each day. Over a year, this “toggle tax” added up to five working weeks or 9% of annual time – lost time which damages productivity and makes it hard to keep focus.
Raycast has been built to combat this digital fragmentation and help people achieve ‘Flow’ – a concept central to its mission to help knowledge workers achieve a perfect state of productivity. Acting as the ultimate shortcut to everything, its platform allows users to interact with different apps without fully switching contexts, enabling them to maintain a state of productive flow. Over 1500 open-source extensions are available to users to make the most of apps like GitHub, Zoom and Notion without losing track of their thoughts.
Thomas Paul Mann, CEO and co-founder of Raycast, said: “Our mission in founding Raycast was to redefine how people interact with their computers. We believe that achieving a state of ‘flow’ is key to productivity and job satisfaction. Raycast isn’t just about saving time – it’s about never wasting it. By allowing users to perform actions like sending Slack messages, checking notifications, or anything else without even opening the app, we’re helping people stay focused and in control of their digital environment.”
Since its launch in 2020, Raycast has become the go-to tool for software engineers, product developers and designers, building a 22k-strong community of developers who use and build on the tool. In total, Raycast has hundreds of thousands of daily active users for its Mac capabilities, and after significant demand the company is also today announcing that they will be launching upcoming iOS and Windows versions soon with users able to register their interest from today here.
Luca Eisenstecken, Partner at Atomico, added: “Thomas and Petr have built an incredible product that solves a crucial problem not only beautifully, but also effectively with a thriving open-source community of developers at its heart. Raycast provides users with virtually limitless opportunities to build a highly personalised productivity platform tailored to their unique workflows. I personally find it indispensable for my daily work. This is further underscored by the remarkable results of our in-depth user research during due diligence, where a staggering 98% of respondents reported a significant increase in their Raycast usage over the past six months.”
Raycast’s platform is incredibly easy and intuitive to use, with broad functionality and repeatable commands. That ease of use is amplified by the fact that it’s fully customisable – it integrates seamlessly with third-party extensions like Jira, GitHub, and Notion, alongside other commonly used applications such as Translate, Spotify, Linear, Google Translate, YouTube, and ChatGPT. Many of these integrations have been built by Raycast’s community of 22,000 developers.
Additionally, Raycast Pro, its AI-enhanced tool acts as a singular AI that will interact with all a user’s tools in natural language, and allow them to create and reuse their own AI prompts, further enhancing the flow state by reducing the need to context switch even for AI interactions. The funding is being put towards investing in Raycast’s cross-platform vision, starting with product development in Windows and iOS and redefining productivity with AI, and will include a number of key European hires across engineering, product and UX specialists in these platforms.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/09/london-based-raycast-raises-e27-million-series-b-to-help-ios-and-windows-enhance-productivity/
