Onin has announced a £2.75 million seed round from Octopus Ventures in its mission to bring calendars into every conversation.
The secure calendar app has launched on the App Store today. The seed investment will be used to scale Onin whilst further developing the product and its features.
Onin was founded by serial entrepreneur and angel investor Ryan Brodie, who has over a decade of experience building app-based businesses with three exits. He previously co-founded the Muslim dating app Muzz, where he attended Y Combinator in 2017.
Alongside Brodie is co-founder David Adler, a former founder and CTO who turned down lead roles from Spotify and Amazon to build Onin. Late last year, Imi Read joined the team as Head of Product Marketing to spearhead the product’s launch and growth.
To date, Onin has raised £3.5m. The company raised an initial £750k pre-seed round in the summer of 2020 from the idea of fixing event planning by combining calendar and chat in one app. Hambro Perks and angel investors, including Matt Clifford of Entrepreneur First and Brodie himself, participated in the company’s pre-seed.
Onin has developed further, launching early access to 1,000 public users earlier this year ahead of its official launch this week.
“Across my career, there’s been one theme – building technology that brings people together,” said Brodie. “From apps that helped promote events to ones that found you a date, the calendar has always been central but disconnected.
“Calendars live outside the conversations that drive them and weren’t designed for the social lives we live today. Onin is solving this problem. Our vision is to build a social world without fragmentation.”
Onin seamlessly integrates with every calendar and chat app, so wherever users plan, their calendar is to hand. The team has consciously built a product with zero switching costs, connecting existing tools.
Onin combines familiar calendar features, such as events, scheduling, and notifications, with social features, including chats, groups, usernames, and invitations.
Users can add the Onin keyboard to their phones by downloading the Onin app. They can then access their calendar from their keyboard in any app, including WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram or even AirBnB. Through the integration, they can check their calendar, add events, and share invites without leaving the conversation.
In the Onin app, users can see a full view of their calendar and join event chats – every Onin event has a dedicated and secure chat for all participants.
Each event, message, and user profile is secured with end-to-end encryption, the company says, with only the recipient and user able to see such details.
Onin is currently free to use and only available to users on iOS. The company plans to launch Android later this year.
Karan Mehta, early-stage investor at Octopus Ventures, added: “Today, services like WhatsApp are used beyond checking in with our family and friends. We use these apps to manage multiple aspects of our personal and professional lives – but the calendar is missing and causing friction. Onin elegantly solves this problem.
“Ryan is a visionary leader and a magnet for exceptional talent. We’re excited to see what he and the team accomplish together in the coming years.”