AceBot.ai Secures $650,000 Institutional Seed Funding from Accel Partners
Aug 10, 2016, 07:00 ET
SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- AceBot.ai, the popular Slackbot that drives productivity for teams that use Slack, has secured a $650,000 seed round from Accel Partners.
Over the past several years, chatbots as well as Slackbots (chatbots native to the popular messaging app Slack) have become increasingly sought after due to how they let users perform commands by interacting with the bot. Despite launching roughly six months ago, AceBot has already made a name for itself within the Slackbot ecosystem through the way it makes things like managing daily to-dos, tracking expenses, running polls, and collecting ratings so easy. This is evidenced by their growing customer list that includes internationally-recognized companies like IBM, PayPal, and Airbnb.
Accel Partners was one of the earliest venture capital firms to realize the potential of Slack and invested in their series A round in 2009. Now, with Slack firmly established as one of the world's most popular messaging apps, they have turned their sights towards building out the ecosystem by funding companies like AceBot.
Shekhar Kirani of Accel comments, "Accel was an early investor in Slack and investing in AceBot was a logical next step to help boost team productivity and collaboration. Messaging apps have a higher userbase in enterprises than social networks. Conversational AI is gaining more traction than GUI. With thousands of active teams, we believe that AceBot is on the trajectory for rapid growth and has the potential to become a must-have productivity bot for every departmental user out there."
The partnership between AceBot and Accel Partners is mutually beneficial, as AceBot Co-Founder and CTO Ralph Vaz insisted on receiving funding from a firm that cared about the overall vision of his company.
"I'm truly honored to work with a well respected firm like Accel Partners," comments Vaz. "Not only do they have a repeated track record of investing in early stage companies that go on to experience success like Facebook, Dropbox, and Spotify, they sincerely believe in our vision. When analyzing who to partner with over the past several months, we made it a point to select a firm that believed in where we are today and where we plan to be three to five years into the future."
What's next for AceBot?
"We'll use the funding to continue to develop what we like to call 'contextual intelligence'. Imagine being able to talk to a bot that not only maintains your tasks, expenses, etc. but also understands its professional context, adding the intelligent quotient that most bots currently lack. With AceBot, we hope to achieve just that," said AceBot's Co-Founder and CEO Ravindra Krishnappa.
About Accel
Accel is a leading early and growth-stage venture capital firm, powering a global community of entrepreneurs. Accel backs entrepreneurs who have what it takes to build a world-class, category-defining business. Founded in 1983, Accel brings more than three decades of experience building and supporting hundreds of companies. Accel’s vision for entrepreneurship and business enables it to identify and invest in the companies that will be responsible for the growth of next-generation industries. Accel-backed companies include Atlassian, BookMyShow, Cloudera, DJI, Dropbox, Dropcam, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, FreshDesk, MuSigma, Myntra, Ola-TaxiForsure, Perfint, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, Vox Media and others. Visit www.accel.com for more or @Accel on Twitter.
About AceBot.ai
AceBot.ai is a Slackbot built for one common goal—to drive your team's productivity and make them more efficient. With skills that help teams report expenses, manage daily tasks, conduct polls, and rate policies, your team can get more done faster without having to leave Slack.
SOURCE AceBot.ai