Scheduling meetings is often among the most repetitive parts of people’s workday. As such, it’s a major focus area for the artificial-intelligence startups that have emerged in recent years to try to enhance office productivity.

One of the highest-profile contenders is Clara Labs Inc., which today secured a $7 million investment led by a new fund called Basis Set Ventures. It was formed earlier this year by veterans of Box Inc. and Chinese web giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. to back early-stage startups developing AI products.

Clara offers a virtual assistant that can be looped into an email thread to help the participants find time to meet. Like the chat-based assistants on services such as Slack, the startup’s bot is programmed to take natural-language commands and generate replies in the same format. What makes Clara unique is its ability to deal with the scheduling hiccups that often crop up when two busy people try to arrange a meeting.

Users can instruct the assistant to push back appointments if their availability changes, automatically follow up with a contact who hasn’t responded to a meeting request and space out calendar entries. The latter feature is intended mainly to ease time management. A salesperson, for instance, might want to leave at least 15 minutes between calls for writing down notes.

If Clara’s algorithms don’t understand a command, the request is sent to a human administrator who will perform the necessary arrangements on behalf of the user. It’s the same approach that another recently funded AI startup called Julie Desk has implemented to improve the accuracy of its rival scheduling bot.

Mindful of the heavy competition, Clara offers several features designed to lure users away. The most notable of the bunch is a configuration tool that makes it possible to trigger a specific action with preselected phrases. If a worker, say, usually has a lot of meetings lined up, she could program Clara to schedule new appointments for next week when an email contains the phrase “sometime in the foreseeable future.”

Today’s funding is intended to help the startup develop more features to stand out from the pack. Besides Julie Desk, Clara also faces off against X.ai Inc. and many smaller players that have all made it their mission to automate the task of scheduling meetings.

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