My favorite calendar app, Tempo, just announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce.com.
The company was incubated by SRI International, the birthplace of the voice-powered (and Apple-acquired) assistant Siri. When Tempo launched two years ago, founder and CEO Raj Singh pitched it as another type of assistant that automatically brings up relevant information for your meetings.
For example, when I look up today’s meetings in the Tempo app, I can view a map of the location (plus look up nearby parking lots or call an Uber), bring up social media posts from everyone invited and read related emails and documents. If it’s a conference call, I can also join the call with one tap (a small touch, but one that makes dialing long conference pass codes much more bearable).
In an announcement on the Tempo website, the startup says:
We started Tempo to build an assistant for the mobile business professional. The calendar was the perfect interface, since it’s the beat of our professional lives. With Tempo, we created a smart calendar, using artificial intelligence to enable the next generation of mobile productivity. We brought context to your events and automated many of your tasks, just like a real-world assistant, saving our users millions of minutes.
Tempo goes on to say that joining Salesforce allows it to “continue our mission at a much larger scale.” Which makes sense — it’s easy to imagine Salesforce customers wanting this kind of smart calendar. In fact, some of the earliest additions to the app seemed tailored for sales and business users.
Whether that means Salesforce will use Tempo’s technology or is basically just hiring the Tempo team isn’t clear. Regardless, it’s bad news for users of the existing Tempo app, which is no longer accepting new users. The company plans to fully discontinue the app on June 30. (Tempo says that if you paid for the app, you can request a refund through Apple’s App Store.)
Tempo has raised $12.5 million in funding from investors, including Relay Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Horizon Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, SingTel Innov8, Miramar Venture Partner, Golden Venture Partners, Seavest Capital Partners and ENIAC Ventures.
Update: A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed the acquisition but declined to comment further.