1/2/2023 0 Comments Slack growbotIn April, Shopify bought chat bot Kit CRM, a virtual marketing assistant that leverages messaging to help businesses market their online stores. The Bot Shop features bots from a list of Kik's partners, including Funny Or Die, Riffsy, Sephora, Vine, and The Weather Channel. That includes Kik, which launched its own bot store in April, following its purchase of fashion advice bot Blynk in December. The rise of chatbots has been one of the dominant themes of tech this year, with a number of companies making bots a major part of their social strategy. On Tuesday the company revealed that there are now over 600 apps in its App Directory, 200 of which were added in the last two months. Categories include design, marketing, office management, developer tools, and productivity. The other big piece of news that Slack had revealed at the time was the creation of the Slack App Directory, a resource for Slack's clients to find over apps for them to offer to their team, making it easier to find apps by sorting them into curated lists by category, popularity, and staff favorites. Maybe it shouldn't be much of a surprise that Slack is so interested in bots, given that, when it announced the fund, it also revealed Botkit, a framework, created by Howdy, that is meant to simplify the creation of apps, and especially bots. The other investments include Butter.ai, Candor, Konsus, Lattice, Sudo, and Wade and Wendy. SLACK GROWBOT SOFTWAREThey include Abacus, which Slack describes as an "intelligent expense reporting software that brings report creation and approvals right into Slack," and Birdly, which connects Slack and Salesforce so that anyone can access the information they need about a given account.Īnother investment was in Growbot, which lets users encourage and commend their teammates, and Myra Labs, which helps developers build bots with an API that provides machine learning modules out of the box. When the fund was first announced in December, it had already invested in three bot companies: Small Wins, Howdy, and Awesome.ai, meaning it has made an additional 11 investments in the last seven months. "To build this kind of ecosystem you need a shared mission, great developer products, a solid distribution mechanism and finally, to help apps make it in the long run, money." "When we started the Slack Fund, we thought a great deal about what it takes to build an ecosystem - an ecosystem where a good idea can become a lasting business, and where we, together with our developers and partners, can dramatically shape the future of work for the better," the company wrote. Nearly all of the companies who have recieved funding have products revolving around bots. Only $1.97 million of that funding came directly from Slack, with the rest coming from its VC partners, including Accel, Andreessen-Horowitz, Index Ventures, KPCB, Spark, and Social+Capital. Lots and lots of bots, as the company revealed on Tuesday that it, along with its partners in the fund, has now invested over a total $30 million in 14 different companies. Now we're finally learning more about the investing strategy, and it looks like the answer is bots. The idea was to give support to developers who want to build their app for the Slack platform, as well as other apps the company can integrate in the future. So, it decided that it would be a good idea to invest some of that capital, partnering with some of the top venture capital firms in the Valley to create an $80 million fund late last year. The company been raising a ton of money since the end of 2014, including $200 million in April of this year, giving it nearly $540 million in the bank. Slack has no shortage of funding to play with.
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