Raycast secures $30M to minimize context switching and expand its Mac productivity app to Windows and iOS

Constantly jumping between tools and workflows is a challenge for knowledge workers, leading to mental strain and a noticeable drop in productivity. A 2022 Harvard Business Review study of Fortune 500 mid and back-office workers revealed that each context switch costs about two seconds, with employees toggling between apps and websites nearly 1,200 times a day.

Seeing this problem firsthand, two former Facebook software engineers, Thomas Paul Mann (CEO) and Petr Nikolaev (CTO), decided to tackle it. Nearly five years ago, they left Meta and, in 2020, launched Raycast, a productivity software startup designed to simplify access to apps, files, and workflows through a keyboard-based interface.

“We built Raycast to solve our own problem as developers,” Mann told TechCrunch. “We were dealing with too many tools every day that kept pulling us away from our work. We needed something that would help us quickly access everything we needed without the distractions.”

Today, Raycast announced it has raised $30 million in a Series B round to combat workplace context switching and sharpen focus. This brings the company’s total funding to over $45 million. Initially a Mac-only app, Raycast now plans to use this investment to expand to iOS and Windows.

The funding round was led by Atomico, with backing from other investors like Accel, Coatue, Y Combinator, Atlassian Ventures, and World Innovation Lab. Notable individual investors included GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.

Raycast had previously raised $17.7 million across two rounds, with Accel leading both and Coatue co-leading the $15 million Series A in 2021.

Raycast

“When we started, our focus was on a niche audience — Mac users and developers,” Mann said. “We’ve since expanded toward a broader prosumer market on Mac. And with Windows, there’s an even larger user base, especially in the workplace. This funding will help us accelerate that growth.”

While software tools are supposed to make life easier, they often do the opposite, creating complexity and fragmentation. Over a year, the constant toggling between apps results in a “toggle tax” that amounts to five weeks of lost work time, about 9% of annual working hours. Raycast was built to tackle this fragmentation and help users achieve a state of ‘flow.’

Raycast acts as a shortcut hub, allowing users to interact with various apps without fully switching contexts, helping them stay focused. The platform offers over 1,500 open-source extensions that integrate with apps like GitHub, Zoom, and Notion, keeping users in the zone without interrupting their workflow.

“Our mission in founding Raycast was to redefine how people interact with their computers.” Mann said: “We believe that achieving a state of ‘flow’ is key to productivity and job satisfaction. Raycast isn’t just about saving time — it’s about never wasting it. By allowing users to perform actions like sending Slack messages, checking notifications, or anything else without even opening the app, we’re helping people stay focused and in control of their digital environment.”

Since its debut in 2020, Raycast has gained a strong following, particularly among software engineers, product developers, and designers. It now boasts a community of 22,000 developers and hundreds of thousands of daily active users for its Mac capabilities.

Raycast’s team, consisting of 30 employees — most of whom are engineers — is based in Europe, with the two founders located in London.