Slack Fund Fueling Further Growth in Hot Bot Space
Slack, the popular office chat and collaboration platform, announced today that it has invested a total of $1.97 million in 14 startups that integrate apps into Slack’s messaging service. The investments came from the Slack Fund, an $80-million venture pool Slack founded last December. Slack set up the fund with participation from several prominent Silicon Valley VC firms, including Accel Partners, Index Ventures, and KPCB, with the goal of investing in innovative Slack integration partners and developers.
Slack had already invested in three startups, Awesome.ai, Begin, and Howdy, which were introduced when the fund launched last year. Today, the company announced investments in an additional 11 companies. Given the intense recent interest in conversational chatbots — and the fact that Slack is easily the most popular platform for building bot integrations — it’s no surprise that the majority of the newest Slack-funded startups are bot makers. Butter.ai, for example, is an AI personal assistant that helps Slack users search for data within their Slack streams.
According to the Slack Developer Blog on Medium, there are now more than 600 apps in Slack’s App Directory, with 200 added in just the last two months. As a platform that openly embraces third-party integrations, Slack considers itself as more than merely a messaging service; rather, it identifies itself as system of intelligently designed products that together make people’s work lives easier and more productive. Slack sees its role as maintaining and augmenting the platform and making it easier for third-party developers to add improvements. As the blog put it recently, “An ecosystem like ours is shared. Our impact as a platform is inherently and inevitably tied to the success of our partners and developers.”
In addition to the $1.97 million funding distributed from the Slack Fund, the 14 startups have secured an additional $30 million in venture funds from the broader VC community.
To see the full list of Slack-funded companies, visit here.
