Chatbot creation tool Bottr.me has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from 500 Startups, Purvi Capital, Google India’s managing director Rajan Anandan, and Abhishek Gupta from TLabs, according to a company executive.
“Chatbots have the potential to replace apps and websites in the near future for one sole reason—they offer user experience in the most rawest and natural form, conversation. Messaging and artificial intelligence have been the biggest trends of this decade and a horizontal platform with network efforts has huge potential to make this happen,†said Abhimanyu Godara, co-founder and chief executive of Bottr.me.
The startup will use the fresh funds for team expansion and product enhancement, Godara told VCCircle.
Launched in private beta mode earlier this year, US-based Bottr.me is founded by Godara, Mayank Agarwal, Arjun Kumar and Uday Krishan. Godara earlier served as chief manager at TLabs and had also worked with KPMG Advisory, while Agarwal and Kumar both worked at virtual assistant startup HelpTap.
Bottr allows users to create an artificial intelligence-based virtual avatar. Its intelligent system is designed to let anyone build an interactive personal bot and hold engaging conversations on all channels on their behalf. A bot boosts users' personal brand voice and helps them engage an audience in conversation. It can acts as a user's personal page, FAQ assistant, customer service agent, microblog, interactive resume and more.
In addition, Bottr recently added new features to its platform such as live chat and managing office hours. The tool is free for users, and Godara said the company has no plans to target enterprises as of yet.
"We already have 5,000 bots on our platform with 20,000 monthly users who interact with bots monthly from all over the world," he added.
Several startups in the AI space have raised funds recently. Last month, Bangalore-based Niki.ai, which runs an artificial intelligence-powered personal assistant, raised $2 million (about Rs 13 crore) in a Series A funding round from San Francisco-based fund SAP.iO and existing investor Unilazer Ventures.
In the same month, Bangalore-based Boxx.ai raised $500,000 (Rs. 3.2 crore) from Mumbai-based venture capital firm Unicorn India Ventures and a clutch of investors.
In May, Vernacular.ai, which offers a multilingual AI platform for businesses, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from KStart Capital, the seed programme run by venture capital firm Kalaari Capital.
In February, Botworx.ai, a conversational commerce platform, had raised $3 million in seed investment led by California-based venture capital firm Costanoa Ventures with support from San Francisco-based angel investment firm S V Angel.