Sunrise Calendar

The calendar app everyone recommended, bought by Microsoft for about $100 million and dismantled into Outlook

Shut down
19902026

Sunrise Calendar was a free calendar app for iPhone, Android and the desktop, launched in February 2013 by the French founders Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van. It pulled in Google Calendar, Exchange and iCloud and connected to Facebook events, Foursquare, Trello, Evernote, GitHub and dozens more services, and its Meet feature negotiated times over messaging. Microsoft bought it in February 2015 for a reported $100 million and switched the apps off in September 2016 after moving the ideas into Outlook Mobile.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2013
  2. February 2013 Launch
    Sunrise launches on iPhone
  3. 2014
  4. 2014 Feature
    Android, Mac and Windows versions
  5. 2015
  6. February 2015 Acquisition
    Microsoft buys Sunrise

    Reported at around $100 million.

  7. June 2015 Feature
    Meet, for proposing times inside a message
  8. 2016
  9. 11 May 2016 Shutdown announced
    Microsoft says Sunrise will be retired

    Originally at the end of August.

  10. 13 September 2016 Shutdown
    The apps stop working

    After a two-week delay.

The site through time

Browse sunrise.am as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2013 2014 2015 2016 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Sunrise Atelier, Inc. 2013–2015 Founded Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van, New York
Microsoft 2015–2016 Acquisition, $100M Reported at around $100 million, three months after Acompli

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Valuation (USD) ▲ $100M February 2015 Reported The reported price Microsoft paid

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Microsoft, which had bought Sunrise in February 2015, said on 11 May 2016 that the app would be retired at the end of August once its features had been rebuilt inside Outlook Mobile. The 31 August date slipped while Microsoft finished shipping those features, and the apps stopped working in mid-September 2016.

Our analysis: Sunrise was the rare acquisition where the buyer actually used what it bought: the interface, the connectors and most of the team went into Outlook Mobile, which got measurably better because of it. That is no comfort to the people who had built their week around it. The app was free, had no revenue and depended on a stack of third-party connectors, so it was never going to survive as a separate product inside Microsoft; the honest description is that Microsoft bought a design team and paid for it with the app.

History [edit]

A calendar people talked about

Sunrise arrived in February 2013 as an iPhone app from two French designers, Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van, working out of New York. It looked unlike other calendars: big type, weather at the top of the day, a three-day view that made sense on a phone, and photographs of the people you were meeting pulled from their profiles.

Underneath, the connectors were the point. Sunrise read Google Calendar, iCloud and Exchange, then layered on Facebook events, Foursquare check-ins, Trello cards, Asana tasks, GitHub issues, TripIt itineraries, Songkick concerts and around sixty more sources. Meet, added in 2015, let you propose times inside a message and have the app sort out the invitation. There was an Android version, a Mac and Windows desktop app, and a keyboard called Sunrise Meet.

Absorbed

Microsoft bought Sunrise in February 2015, reported at around $100 million, three months after it had bought the email app Acompli for about $200 million. Acompli became Outlook Mobile; Sunrise was going to become its calendar. Through 2015 the Sunrise team worked on both, and the interesting parts of Sunrise, the interconnected calendars, the day view, the interest calendars for sport and television, turned up inside Outlook.

On 11 May 2016 Microsoft said Sunrise would be retired at the end of August. The date moved: the team said it wanted to ship a few more Sunrise-derived features in Outlook first, and the apps kept working into September before finally stopping around 13 September 2016. Pierre Valade left Microsoft in 2017 and later founded the privacy company Jumbo.

The domain today

sunrise.am no longer serves the app. Its ideas live in Outlook Mobile, which still uses the day view and the interest calendars that Sunrise brought with it.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Microsoft will shut down calendar app Sunrise in August GeekWire 11 May 2016 [archived]
  2. Sunrise was the best calendar app ever TechCrunch 31 August 2016 [archived]
  3. Microsoft postpones Sunrise Calendar app's shutdown GSMArena 2 September 2016 [archived]
  4. Sunrise Calendar HandWiki 1 January 2023
  5. The sun is setting on Microsoft's Sunrise calendar app Forbes 11 May 2016 [archived]

Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).