Slack invests in Montreal chatbot startup
Slack has invested an undisclosed amount into a new Montreal chatbot startup called Automat.
“I’d prefer not to get into specifics. Suffice to say that Automat is one of the most well-capitalized seed stage companies in the messaging and bot space,” Automat founder Andy Mauro told MTLinTECH.
According to Automat’s website, the company is “powering the second wave of messaging and bots.” Moreover, the team says its has over 50 years years experience collectively creating AI conversational experiences and “17 patents in the fields of speech recognition, natural language understanding, virtual assistants and AI.”
Slack‘s CEO Stewart Butterfield recently launched his own $80 million VC fund and app store shortly after it was reported to be worth $2.8 billion.
Andy Mauro
Chatbot and AI are highly popular topics within tech right now. Last week a Shopify-owned virtual marketing assistant called Kit CRM announced the launch of its chatbot on Facebook Messenger. As VentureBeat pointed out, any of the more than 900 million monthly Facebook messenger users will be able to have access to a virtual employee right at their fingertips.
Automat, meanwhile, allows brands and influencers to communicate with their customers, fans, and employees by using a mixture of mobile messaging, artificial intelligence, and chatbot technology. That’s according to Business Insider,
Mauro founded the company in January, wrote BI. He was the former senior director of the “cognitive innovations group” at Nuance Communications, a US-based tech outfit that uses natural language understanding and voice recognition to help power devices for companies such as Samsung, Ford, and Domino’s.
Automat counts Tim O’Reilly, Chris Messina, the “inventor of the hashtag” and Uber developer experience lead, and Gary Clayton amongst its investors and advisors. Relay Ventures, Real Ventures, You & Mr Jones, USAA, and OATV also invested in the company.
In Montreal an immigration-focused chatbot in Botler.ai was recently the recipient of the $100,000 FounderFuel award at Startupfest.
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