Timekit wants to make it easy to build your own online booking system

Timekit, a Danish startup that offers a developer-friendly online booking platform, has closed $1.7 million in seed funding. The round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from a group of rather noteworthy angel investors.

The latter includes former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn, Libratone founder Tommy Andersen, Songkick founder Ian Hogarth, and serial entrepreneur Hampus Jakobsson of TAT/BlackBerry fame.

In addition, I’m told that Timekit has joined Heavybit, a program for developer product companies established by Heroku founder James Lindenbaum.

Founded in 2015, Timekit is aimed at companies who want to build their own booking system so that they can take bookings of various complexity online. It does this via the Timekit API and, most recently, a web app that allows developers and designers to build their own booking system through a simple visual interface.

“Our mission is to help companies manage resources in a more efficient way and give their users and customers more enjoyable booking experiences,” Timekit co-founder and CEO Jesper Klingenberg tells me. “Too many times online bookings flows are handled by outdated software solutions that are too rigid and too inflexible for a company’s unique business needs”.

To address this, Timekit has developed a booking engine, underpinned by modular software, to enable companies to build their own booking flows. “If they need to add payments, custom reminders via webhooks, programmatically add/delete available resources or build complex availability rules it can be handled by Timekit with minimal coding,” says Klingenberg.

A typical Timekit customer is the type of company for which a traditional booking system isn’t suitable. This could be because of complex and unique scheduling needs that do not fit into the workflow of existing tools, or because they require the ability to make their booking systems appear native with the same look and feel as their own website/app.

“A good example is a large co-working space in London that were using a traditional “out-of-the-box” solution for room bookings,” adds the Timekit CEO. “They needed to add custom rules, add payments and handle availability in real-time while running everything on Google calendar. With Timekit they set up a solution that fits all their needs with minimal work required by their developer”.