Montréal-based Botpress has secured $25 million USD (over $34 million CAD) in Series B funding to scale its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure product as the agentic AI race heats up.
AI agents are software systems that use AI to autonomously perform tasks to achieve specific goals. Their potential impact is the subject of a lot of hype, as well as some caution, right now.
Botpress pivoted post-Series A to offering “an all-in-one platform” for building and deploying AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs). Today, the startup claims to provide “the infrastructure layer that allows companies to deploy AI agents safely, reliably, and at scale.”
“There’s a lot of infrastructure to build … We’ve been building all that infrastructure.”
“We hear a lot about AI, but can we point to agents deployed in the wild that perform really well?” Botpress co-founder and CEO Sylvain Perron posed to BetaKit in an interview. “We’re still very, very early, and the reason why is [that] there’s a lot of infrastructure to build … We’ve been building all that infrastructure.”
Botpress plans to use this funding to accelerate its product development plans, expand its customer support, and grow its engineering and go-to-market teams. The company’s gameplan includes doubling the size of its 65-person team over the coming year, opening a new office and data centre in Europe, and releasing voice capabilities during the next quarter.
The startup’s all-equity, all-primary round closed in May. It was led by Toronto’s Framework Venture Partners with support from fellow new investors Toronto-based Deloitte Ventures and Boston’s HubSpot Ventures, and existing backers Inovia Capital (of Montréal) and Palo Alto, Calif.-based Decibel Partners. The financing brings Botpress’ total funding to $45 million USD.
Botpress’ Series B came at a $120-million USD post-money valuation, more than double the $50 million that the company was valued at post-money after its $15-million Series A in 2021.
Founded in 2017 by Perron and Justin Watson with the hypothesis that computers would someday be able to speak and operate software like humans, the conversational AI startup initially sought to help developers at other firms take advantage of the first wave of chatbots. Botpress saw some success with this approach, but Perron said that the return on investment for these bots was “tricky,” noting that they required a lot of time and money to train.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—prior to the release of ChatGPT in late 2022—Botpress began looking into LLMs and OpenAI, and decided to execute “a full pivot.”
“We saw the future,” Perron said, adding that Botpress decided to rebuild its platform and become “LLM-native” because it realized that this was where the AI market was going. The company made some layoffs and set to work on developing its new offering.
“On one side, you have millions of businesses that need AI now … and on the other side, there’s this very raw and very fast-changing technology,” Perron said.
The CEO argued that there is a need for “a professional services layer” between LLM providers and end users to help turn the demand for generative AI into useful, concrete applications. Botpress aims to play a role here by offering a platform that helps agency partners of all sizes help companies develop, launch, and monitor agentic AI systems.
According to Botpress, deploying reliable agents still requires safe execution environments, orchestration layers, memory management, tool integration, and consistent runtime isolation. The company’s product provides this, supporting both no-code and developer-level control.
Today, Botpress supports clients running live agents across a variety of industries and use cases, including customer support, FinTech, IT services, and consumer tech. For instance, Botpress has helped Les Producteurs de lait du Québec launch a French-language “cheese butler” called Froméo that recommends various cheeses, and San Francisco-based Ruby Labs manage an end-to-end customer support flow for consumer subscription apps.
“We provide the tools to build, the infrastructure to deploy, and … everything you need to manage them, make them better, review whatever is happening and audit them,” Perron said.
Botpress sells to both agencies and end users, charging based on agent usage. Perron described its model as “very much the same as [website hosting platform] WordPress,” and argued this approach positions Botpress to enable “the distribution of whatever technology is going to be there tomorrow, as quickly as possible, with high margins for our agencies.”
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Botpress has spent the past few years refining its product, which it began monetizing at the beginning of last year. Since then, Perron claimed Botpress has doubled its revenue every quarter, and these days, Perron claimed that more than 2,000 developers are joining its platform on a daily basis.
Perron said Botpress has approximately 3,000 paying customers and nearly one million free users. He expects its new business to surpass $10 million USD in annual revenue this year. While Botpress continues to maintain its first product for existing clients, the startup is not selling it to any new ones, and its focus is largely on expanding its new offering.
“A vast demand is emerging for the robust, production-grade development platform that Botpress offers.”
Jim Texier,
Framework
“Right now, we have more coming our way than we can handle,” Perron said, adding that the company needed a capital injection to help it scale quickly to meet demand.
Inovia initially invested in Botpress’ Series A when it was just an open-source chatbot platform, and is also a believer in the startup’s revised approach, which Inovia partner Magaly Charbonneau told BetaKit has generated “exceptional traction and exponential growth.”
“We see a multi-billion-dollar total addressable market for AI agent platforms within the rapidly growing global conversational AI software market,” Charbonneau said. “We believe the market is still early-cycle, with ample room for multiple significant winners.”
As part of this round, Framework partner and CTO Jim Texier is joining Botpress’ board as a director, alongside Deloitte Ventures managing director Jon Wolkin as an observer.
“As companies of all sizes transition from experimentation to deployment in their agentic AI journey, a vast demand is emerging for the robust, production-grade development platform that Botpress offers,” Texier told BetaKit. “The platform’s fast proliferation across use cases, geographies and verticals is a testament to the team’s talent density and execution velocity.”
Feature image courtesy Botpress.