In a blog post, Slack has revealed the seven new companies backed through its $106 million ($80 million USD) Slack Fund, which the company launched in December 2015.
The fund is dedicated to early-stage investments in companies that are building apps in Slack. Companies selected for the fund fit in the B2B category, and build tools ranging from customer support to products that engineers use to speed up the development process.
According to Slack, many of these companies’ products and tools are still in the very early stages and will be coming out in the coming months.
The latest Slackbot companies to receive funding include:
- Polly: a tool that lets customers build enterprise surveys and polls in Slack.
- Neva: a virtual agent that provides AI-driven automation for support, whether that is IT support within an organization or customer support for clients.
- Drafted: a referral hiring platform that matches people in your team’s network to open roles at your company, while making intelligent suggestions about whom to refer.
- StdLib: uses “server-less” technology that allows people to ship software products and build an API business without managing infrastructure. StdLib provides the tool necessary to build, deploy, and scale Slack Apps with very little effort.
- Loom: a video collaboration platform that lets team members record and share quick videos through an organization.
- PinPT Software: helps business understand what they are spending, both in dollars and in human capital, on creating and deploying software.
- Parabol: provides a team project dashboard to help you run projects efficiently.
Past companies selected for the Slack Fund include Automat, which recently raised an $11 million Series A to build a conversational AI platform; and Guru, which has grown to over 260 paying customers, including Shopify, square, Optimizely and Dell.