It usually takes years to get from the technology trigger, to peak inflated expectations, to trough. Do you think it’s risky to be investing during what seems to be a swift approach to the trough of disillusionment?Įverything with bots is ahead of schedule. I was looking at a graphic about the bot hype cycle. And if you draw a line around it, it’s called bots.
In 2008, it was mobile and social, now it’s AI, messaging and conversational AI. Now what’s being created is the tech that will power the next wave of innovation.
But now think of all the brands today, the Ubers, Airbnbs and others established in that period. I think we are in a relatively slow period right now, similar to 2007-2008 when the economy was slow there was all sorts of turmoil in the world, and people were asking if the important period for tech was over, that all the important companies were already built. But for the next couple of years you can still have a specific set of things that you can call bots and focus on those. Two years from now it won’t be possible to say, I’m focusing on bots because the underlying ideas will have gone into the fabric of things. I think they are a big part of the future. With that in mind, I talked to him about his new investments, and why he thinks some bots are hot, and some are not. Libin told me in an interview that he’s been pitched about 200 bots in the last few months. But as with other hype cycles, the reality so far hasn’t been entirely great: There are too many out there, and way too many not working as planned. The rush of bots may be exciting to contemplate - there is a lot of promise in the idea of combining artificial intelligence, natural conversation and super fast computing to make our lives easier. Startups and others are also building hundreds of bots, either as standalone services or as small apps that sit on larger platforms like Slack or Facebook’s Messenger. Larger companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and even to some extent Apple are all trying their hand at ways of providing more to users in an automated way by way of voice and conversational interface. That is due to launch in the autumn.īut those three are just the tip of the iceberg.Īs you’ve probably seen, bots have been appearing everywhere of late.
The two come on the heels of Libin’s first investment at GC, for another productivity bot service still in stealth called Begin, co-founded by Ryan Block (a serial entrepreneur who has sold two past companies to AOL, which also owns TechCrunch) and Brian Leroux. Growbot’s motivational tool essentially works in the background, letting you rack up and chart praise for people, with the service triggered by certain keywords.īutter.ai, meanwhile, should launch later this year, and, according to a short post from Jack Hirsch (Evernote’s former VP of product who is now CEO of Butter.ai), it sounds like the idea will be to give users a way of finding things in their trove of work documents and other data by asking the Butter bot questions.
Growbot has been in the market for about a year and has 4,800 companies using its free bot, writes founder Jeremy Vandehey. And Growbot, a messaging bot designed for congratulating co-workers via Slack, has raised a seed round of $1.7 million, with other investors including XSeed Capital and Inventus Capital Partners. Now those investments are coming to light.īutter.ai - started by a team of ex-Evernoters - has raised a seed round of $3 million from General Catalyst for a productivity app that is still in stealth. Earlier this year, Phil Libin, the former CEO of Evernote who is now a venture capitalist at General Catalyst, laid out plans to fund and support (and maybe even build?) his own startups in the burgeoning world of bots - services that use conversational interfaces and varying degrees of artificial intelligence to provide users with information, products and more.