ClickUp adds new AI assistant to better compete with Slack and Notion

ClickUp has redesigned its productivity platform and released new AI assistant features as it aims to create a one-stop shop for customers.

The company said key parts of this release were possible because of Catalog acquisitionThe enterprise search startup that had raised over $29.5 million from backers like Salesforce Ventures, Atomico, Prototype Capital, Mosaic Ventures, Tiny VC, and Possible Ventures.

ClickUp is launching two types of AI agents with its 4.0 release. The first is an agent who is present in all communication channels. The agent is designed to actively look for questions asked by people and try to answer them using knowledge stored within the company and external sources like Google Drive, OneDrive, Figma, and Gmail.

The second assistant, called Brain, is a more general-purpose assistant that can generate ideas, perform tasks like scheduling meetings based on the availability of teammates as well as add a comment under a task, or create a new one. It can also access the web and other integrated tools, analyze and draft reports. Like many other AI assistants, Brain lives in the sidebar and is accessible anywhere on the ClickUp interface.

The a16z-backed productivity company said the new release is making it easier for users to switch between tasks, documents, and communications. ClickUp 4.0 lets you view your internal company forum timeline, switch between different communication channels, and view your actions through options in the sidebar.

ClickUp is trying to compete better with companies like Notion, Looseand Microsoft Teams by providing calendars, communications and documents, enterprise search, and task tracking under one product.

The startup has tried to make its communications feature similarity to Slack and Teams. It launched AI-powered summaries and Internal live video and audio calls called Synapse last yearNow it’s putting a sync button in each channel and also allowing its AI notetaker to record these live video calls, transcribe them, and send the notes to everyone.

Company Calendar Tool If you mark a certain task as a priority you can now see your meeting spread and automatically adjust meetings and tasks. ClickUp also displays an Internet-style team dashboard where leaders can see various updates from different channels, view team analytics on work in progress and check who has time off this week.

“Eight years ago, when we started, the vision and strategy was to replace all your work software. The strategy to do that was to build a flexible data model platform that could be used for essentially anything, and build out the primitives of the software like a spreadsheet, a table, a document, and a task,” Zeb Evans, CEO of ClickUp, told TechCrunch on a call. “In the age of AI, they are needed even more because you can’t really visualize things in AI within a chat interface.”

Evans said ClickUp has grown tremendously over the past few years and has surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue. He said that with this growth rate, the company plans to go public within two years. According to Crunchbase data, ClickUp has raised over $537 million in funding so far from investors like a16z, Tiger Global, Craft Ventures, and Lightspeed.