The rapid rise of bots - small programs that essentially replace human interactions with AI and machine learning to help you, a human, get something done or find out information a little quicker - is something that we’ve been tracking for a while now. (Those previous three are Awesome.ai, Begin and Howdy.) It brings the total number of startups funded to date to 14, adding in three startups that Slack announced along with the launch seven months ago.

All told, these companies collectively have raised around $30 million. The startups getting announced today are Abacus, Automat, Birdly, Butter.ai, Candor, Inc., Growbot, Konsus, Lattice, Myra Labs, Sudo and Wade & Wendy. The investment comes by way of its Slack Fund, an $80 million investment vehicle first announced in December 2015, where Slack is teaming up with several top VCs to put money into promising startups as part of larger early-stage rounds. Today, Slack announced it has invested a total of $1.97 million in 14 startups and unveiled the latest 11 in that list - all bot-style services. And now the company is expanding on another part of its platform strategy. As of today, there are 600 apps integrated with the service, letting you bring in content from other services and share it with other users by way of simple, short codes. Slack, the popular messaging app for co-workers to chat, share files and distract each other with GIFs, has taken some major steps forward to establish itself as a wider productivity platform.

Growbot slack