7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI News Quizzes Tasty As/Is More Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI Conversational commerce is exploding in chat, delivering what you want, when you want it. Get to know the VCs and angels making it happen. Posted on July 15, 2018, at 2:59 a.m. martineparis Community Contributor Share Share https://www.buzzfeed.com/martineparis/follow-the-money-meet-the-investors-of-conversati-3ehs5?utm_term=.bx71wjgPEy#.aveWOLNrGK 1/43 7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI Boost VC / Via boost.vc Share Pin Hey Google, Alexa. Cortana, Siri and Messenger, 2018 is shaping up to be boom times. As AI investment soars to historic highs, there's a renewed excitement among developers to create more productive, intelligent voice and text interaction between humans and chatbots. Q1 2018 pulled in $1.9 billion across 116 deals making it the biggest quarter ever, according to PwC's MoneyTree report. This influx of money is fueling dramatic advances in predictive analytics and deep learning, and accelerating the ability for algorithms to infer preferences from what we post across social media. With over 5 billion people on the messaging apps, the market potential for conversational commerce is massive. Facebook, Amazon and Google, armed with our credit cards, calendars, location, and behavioral data, are already able to order us Ubers, event tickets, outfits, restaurants and hotel rooms just by asking a few questions in chat. It won't be long before bots are also able to match us with the perfect mates, housing, and jobs. "Ads are getting more relevant on these platforms. One day, upon being shown an ad on Instagram, you'll be able to say I want it and the bot will confirm store, brand, item name, size, color, address, and payment method - all through conversational UI. An ‘I want it’ from you and it ships. That will be a watershed moment for Facebook and a huge revenue stream. It will help small businesses do commerce better and will save users time from downloading apps or clicking around a website,” said Kevin Raheja, Head of Strategic Partnerships at HubSpot. For anyone who has shopped in a Shopify store powered by Octane AI, you may have experienced a helpful chatbot reaching out in Messenger to help you complete your order. "70% of people abandon their carts while shopping online," said Ben Parr, co-founder and CMO of Octane AI, "With our bots, stores are increasing abandoned cart revenue by 250% which on average translates to an increase of 7-25% in revenue per store," For those that get it right, there's a lot of money in conversational commerce. "A Prime member spends $600 more annually that a non-Prime shopper, and Echo shoppers spend another $400 more!" said Molly co-founder Chris Messina in his recent Medium post. The faster and easier it is to order what we need, the more we spend. In a much celebrated move this past April, Facebook introduced the Messenger Store to help users find and engage with the more than 100,000 bots that's been developed for the platform. The store offers editorial features and categories to browse, and can be found in the Discovery tab at the bottom of messages. Although there are no charts yet to track top grossing apps, developers are able to report their own stats, and some are doing very well like SnapTravel, a hotel booking bot, which announced over $1 million of Messenger bookings at F8. Although Messenger still doesn't have a dedicated fund or accelerator to support its developer ecosystem, Amazon, Google and Microsoft do, and there are a growing number of corporate https://www.buzzfeed.com/martineparis/follow-the-money-meet-the-investors-of-conversati-3ehs5?utm_term=.bx71wjgPEy#.aveWOLNrGK 2/43 7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI investors. venture capital firms, and angels profiled below who are placing bets on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. With their collective efforts, we can expect to soon see computer interaction that's friendlier, more efficient, and more human. Meet The 40 Investors Rocking Chat 1. Adam Draper, Boost VC Boost VC / Via boost.vc Share Pin https://www.buzzfeed.com/martineparis/follow-the-money-meet-the-investors-of-conversati-3ehs5?utm_term=.bx71wjgPEy#.aveWOLNrGK 3/43 7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI Adam Draper is the co-founder of Boost VC, a hybrid fund/accelerator that invests in 20 pre-seed startups twice a year and offers a 3 month accelerator that includes housing and office space in Silicon Valley. Portfolio consists of 200+ companies who have raised over $1 billion. Boost VC has made several AI investments including Octane AI, a Messenger bot concierge for Shopify stores. Octane AI co-founder Ben Parr described what it's like to work with Boost VC. “Boost VC was our first investor. Adam and Brayton have had our back every step of the way, they’ve introduced us to multiple customers and investors of later rounds, and have been a very positive resource." 2. Adrian Fenty, M Ventures https://www.buzzfeed.com/martineparis/follow-the-money-meet-the-investors-of-conversati-3ehs5?utm_term=.bx71wjgPEy#.aveWOLNrGK 4/43 7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI Wikipedia / Via en.wikipedia.org Share Pin Adrian Fenty is the managing partner of M Ventures and the former Mayor of Washington D.C..The fund has invested in a number of conversational AI startups including Octane AI, Drift and the AI Foundation. 3. Alex Ferrara, Bessemer Venture Partners CNBC / Via cnbc.com Share Pin https://www.buzzfeed.com/martineparis/follow-the-money-meet-the-investors-of-conversati-3ehs5?utm_term=.bx71wjgPEy#.aveWOLNrGK 5/43 7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI Alex Ferrara is Bessemer's lead partner on Dashbot, a conversational analytics platform, On his team is Jenny Gao who spoke recently at Dashbot's SuperBot 2018 conference on growing up with Alexa. “What does a generation of Alexa-raised kids look like? People didn’t take to voice interfaces quickly, but consider the evolution of human interaction with technology: Consumers are instantly disappointed when they can’t zoom with their index finger and thumb. Next up, a voice-first world can’t be far off." 4. Alex Mittal, FundersClub Launch Incubator / Via launchincubator.co Share Pin https://www.buzzfeed.com/martineparis/follow-the-money-meet-the-investors-of-conversati-3ehs5?utm_term=.bx71wjgPEy#.aveWOLNrGK 6/43 7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI Alex Mittal is the co-founder of FundersClub, launched in 2012 as an online micro VC that makes pre- seed investments. FundersClub portfolio companies have gone on to raise over $2 billion of follow on capital from other leading venture capital firms and are valued at more than $7.6 billion. Portfolio includes: Slack, Coinbase, Instacart, Le Tote, Flexport, and conversational AI startup Unbabel which applies machine learning to translation to enable seamless, trusted cross-language communication. 5. Andrew Ng, AI Fund Andrew Ng / Via aifund.ai Share Pin Andrew Ng is the co-founder of Coursera, former Head of Baidu AI, and mastermind behind Google Brain's deep learning work. In January, Ng raised $175 million from NEA, Sequoia, Greylock and https://www.buzzfeed.com/martineparis/follow-the-money-meet-the-investors-of-conversati-3ehs5?utm_term=.bx71wjgPEy#.aveWOLNrGK 7/43 7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI Softback to launch AI Fund, an accelerator focused on developing transformative AI applications for manufacturing and enterprise. 6. Anne Patterson, Gradient Ventures CNET / Via cnet.com Share Pin Anne Patterson is founder and managing partner of Google AI fund, Gradient Ventures, which is seeking investments in startups focused on machine intelligence. Google Assistant Investments is operated separately. Patterson is on the board of Square and is a Stanford alum. 7. Ben Metcalfe, Ridge Ventures https://www.buzzfeed.com/martineparis/follow-the-money-meet-the-investors-of-conversati-3ehs5?utm_term=.bx71wjgPEy#.aveWOLNrGK 8/43 7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI Ben Metcalfe / Via linkedin.com Share Pin Ben Metcalfe is an investor at Ridge Ventures, co-founder of WP Engine, and former Uber, MySpace, and BBCNews. Metcalfe works with Alex Rosen who led investment in MindMeld, a platform for creating bots which was bought by Cisco last year. Metcalfe shared with me his thoughts on the space, "I'm excited about the new interfaces and platforms conversational AI is enabling - Alexa and Google in our homes are great examples today but we're going to see rapid developments in automotive, industrial and healthcare applications where startups will be able to create massive value. I would also add that founders are going to need to tread carefully in the tightly controlled verticalized platforms like Alexa and Google Home, where the vendor controls every level of the stack. I hope that commoditization of the technology and greater competition will turn many of the walled gardens into open playgrounds where entrepreneurs and investors alike can feel safer exploring." https://www.buzzfeed.com/martineparis/follow-the-money-meet-the-investors-of-conversati-3ehs5?utm_term=.bx71wjgPEy#.aveWOLNrGK 9/43 7/15/2018 Follow The Money: Meet The Investors Of Conversational AI 8. Bill Reichert, Fenox Venture Capital tyinternety.cz / Via tyinternety.cz Share Pin Bill Reichert is a partner at Fenox Venture Capital who manages investments in the U.S.