It's fair to say that Tempo AI's big February public launch of its smart calendar app attracted the attention of investors, CEO and Raj Singh said. Tempo wasn't planning on raising money until later this summer, but it wound up closing a $10 million Series A within a month of starting negotiations, he said.

"It was a very competitive round," Singh said. "The competition was high even from the inside investors to participate."

Relay Ventures and new investor Sierra Ventures led the charge, but all of Tempo's $2.5 million-seed round investors also re-upped: Mayfield Fund, Horizon Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, SingTel Innov8, Miramar Venture Partners, SRI International, Golden Venture Partners, Seavest Capital Partners, ENIAC Ventures, as well as angel investors Gaurav Garg (formerly of Sequoia Capital) and Peter Wagner (formerly of Accel Partners).

Tempo makes a calendar app for the iPhone and iPad that connects to your various email and social media accounts and scours them for contextual information. It then uses artificial intelligence technology originally developed by SRI – much of which went into Apple's(s aapl) Siri – to process that data in the cloud. It then spits back into your app details about appointments and scheduled activities you never entered.

For instance, if you enter "Meet Bob at Starbucks" into the calendar, Tempo can figure out which Bob you mean by examining your contacts and email. It knows what Starbucks you're referring to based on past meeting and email history, your likely location based on nearby calendar appointments and by examining your check-in data on Facebook(s fb) and Foursquare. It can then plug in Bob's contact details and meeting location details automatically into a calendar. If the AI finds more than one likely option it will present you with those choices.

Tempo's goal, however, is evolve beyond a mere calendar into a full-bore virtual assistant, but it doesn't want to just be a Siri clone. Instead of creating an assistant you actively query for info, it wants to create a background assistant that anticipates your actions by processing reams of public and private user data. For instance, in the example above, Tempo wants to be able make suggestions on when you should leave for that meeting with Bob based on traffic conditions, and make suggestions to both you and Bob on alternate locations or times in case one of you has to cancel.

Beyond that, Singh said he sees Tempo's technology making its way into other apps and possibly into the core user interface of existing operating systems. Singh wouldn't go into specific details, but he said if Tempo is only making a calendar app in a few years, then the company will have failed to achieve its goals. "The calendar has always been a proxy for a full-fledged virtual assistant," Singh said.