General Catalyst's Phil Libin leads seed rounds for two more bot companies, Butter.ai and Growbot, and explains why he's investing in the space
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Context & Ripple Effects
Phil Libin arrived at General Catalyst after stepping down as Evernote CEO, and these two seed rounds are the first public articulation of what he plans to do there: back conversational software before it has a category name. The related coverage frames Butter.ai and Growbot not as isolated bets but as the opening of a deliberate bot portfolio.
The arc matters because it resolves quickly — within a year Libin leaves General Catalyst to found All Turtles, an AI startup studio that takes several GC-backed bot companies with it as foundation members. These seeds were effectively the scouting phase for that studio.
First-order effects
- Butter.ai and Growbot close their seed rounds with Libin leading both, giving two unproven bot startups capital plus the credibility of a high-profile founder-turned-investor at exactly the moment messaging platforms are courting bot developers.
Second-order effects
- Libin's concentration on bots forces the question of whether General Catalyst backs him inside the firm or loses the portfolio — which is what happens when he exits for All Turtles, taking several GC-backed AI startups along as foundation members.
- Other automation startups in the same orbit validate the thesis downstream: Botkeeper, applying AI to bookkeeping workflows, scales from a $25M Series B led by Point72 Ventures to a $42M Series C led by Grand Oaks Capital within roughly a year.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, operator-investors stop routing AI bets through generalist firms and build dedicated vehicles — studios like All Turtles — around a single thesis, while the original firms keep writing large checks separately, as General Catalyst did years later leading Collaborative Robotics' $100M Series B for workplace cobots.
The trend: AI investing is shifting from generalist venture funds toward thesis-dedicated vehicles run by individual operators, with portfolio companies migrating between them.