Our investment in Raycast: the shortcut to everything

Our computers are an easy place to get lost. It’s something that happens to everyone - you switch from one tool to another, or open a new tab and think - ‘Wait, what was I doing?’. 

Our newest portfolio company, Raycast, was created to eliminate that moment. While new tools and software are typically introduced as a way to increase productivity and make people’s lives easier, there’s now too many. Knowledge workers are constantly switching from one context to another, and often losing their train of thought on the way. 

A 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’s mission is to help knowledge workers achieve the perfect state of productivity - a state of ‘Flow’. The ultimate shortcut to everything, its platform allows users to interact with different apps without ever fully switching contexts, enabling them to keep track of their thoughts and complete tasks without falling down a rabbit hole of different tools and programmes. With over 1,500 open-source extensions available, users can make the most of apps like GitHub, Zoom and Notion without getting lost or losing focus. 

Founded by Thomas Paul Mann and Petr Nikolaev in 2020, Raycast is now the go-to tool for software engineers, product developers and designers, with a community of over 22,000 developers who use and build on the tool. It has hundreds of thousands of daily active users for its Mac OS application, and after incredibly high demand, the company will soon be launching on iOS and Windows.

With this Series B round, Raycast will invest in its cross-platform vision, starting with product development in Windows and iOS and redefining productivity with AI. The company is also planning to make a number of key European hires across engineering, product and UX specialists in these platforms.

Atomico partner Luca Eisenstecken will join Raycast’s board as part of this investment.