Slack announced today that it has invested in near a dozen new bot startups to bolster its Slack App Directory. The investments were announced today in a Slack blog post.
The chat app for team collaboration has invested in 25 startups thus far with money from Slack Fund, an $80 million investment fund backed by venture capital firms like Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
The group of startups announced today, like Salesforce data-tracking Troops and internal company blog Bold, is the third wave of Slack Fund investments.
The first investments were made in December 2015 in startups Awesome.ai, Small Wins, and Howdy, maker of the Botkit open source framework that can be used to create bots for Slack. Last July, Slack announced its second round of investments in 11 companies like Growbot and Automat.
Slack launched its platform for bots and its Slack App Directory in December 2015, the same day it launched the Slack Fund.
Related: 5 Tips for Promoting Your Business on LinkedIn
Since its launch of the platform and an initial 150 apps, the Slack App Directory has grown to include more than 750 apps and apps have been downloaded more than six million times.
Slack declined to disclose the amount of money invested in each company.
Among them:
Guru creates a searchable knowledge base for your team based on conversations in Slack.
Bold is like Medium for companies and is meant to give employees a platform to spread good ideas.
DataFox automates reports and notifications about companies you want to turn into customers.
Troops brings Salesforce data into Slack and serves up regular team performance reports.
Demisto helps give the Security Operations team peace of mind by automatically alerting users if a malicious URL or file is shared in Slack.
Donut arranges meetings between one-on-one meetings between colleagues to improve team communication.
WorkRamp is a training platform for sales teams built into Slack.
Twine can be used for video calls and to share content in Slack.
Synveroz is a voice chat platform for teams to communicate in real time.
Slack is not the only company giving away funding to startups interested in creating bots. IBM, Amazon, Twilio, and other companies are giving away $450 million to makers of bots, virtual assistants, and other innovative tech.
This article originally appeared on VentureBeat. All rights reserved.
