Two of the biggest chatbot development communities in the market is currently in the process of joining forces – driven by the belief that this is just the beginning for bots. “Howdy,” a company backed by experts like Slack and Bloomberg Beta, recently announced its purchase of “Botmetrics”, a new company funded by Graph Ventures and Social Capitals.
The details of the deal remain undisclosed, but the collaboration will see the founders for Botmetrics, Sandeep Chivukula, and Arun Thampi joining up with Howdy while the services are integrated. Beyond the initial integration, we’re not sure whether the pair will be staying within Howdy or not.
The Chatbot Collaboration
Both start-ups in this new partnership specialise in assisting developers and companies to create bots. There are some similarities in how each company does business; for instance, they both provide open-source platforms for bot development, and provide value-added services that cater to more significant use-cases for a price. Together, the pair have processed more than 500 million different customer interactions.
Howdy gives businesses the tools to improve bot performance through a range of services. On the other hand, Botmetrics delivers software for tracking interactions and collecting data to improve the bot experience for everyone involved. Following the completion of the deal, the two companies will continue to provide their services independently. However, Howdy is currently working to integrate the Botmetrics paid-for services into their “Botkit studio” suite.
Currently, Botkit is the most popular tool available for developing bots. However, the CEO of Howdy, Ben Brown has said that customers need more functionality to operate. While Howdy had a lot to offer, they felt that Botmetrics was the other piece of the puzzle when it came to offering customers comprehensive services.
Introducing the Bot Hype
In 2016, the introduction of the chatbot craze was the start of a communications revolution similar to the launch of the App Store. Facebook emerged as one of the first giants to enter the space, but the platform has yet to deliver anything close to what was expected. However, Botmetrics and Howdy both believe that there’s plenty of room for growth for both of their businesses, especially in the enterprise space.
There has been a significant amount of hype around solving problems in the consumer space. However, there could be more opportunities for growth in the enterprise space. If you look at Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Spark, for instance, more content is now being created in the enterprise space via conversational interfaces, and people want to access the data through the same interface.
The minds behind Botmetrics and Howdy both believe that enterprise is a place of consistent growth, where their companies will see success. Howdy’s CEO added that the brand is currently working to introduce new services beyond their integration, which will include support for introducing bots to web pages, and hosting them within channels for private messaging. He said that the venue for bots can’t be limited to just Slack or Facebook, it needs to be everywhere.
In October 2015, Howdy raised 1.5 million in funding, and the company is now exploring new financial options.
