Slack makes investments in 11 new bot makers as part of Slack Fund, including startups that integrate Salesforce, improve search, more
Slack announced today that it has invested in nearly a dozen new bot startups to bolster its Slack App Directory. — The team collaboration chat app …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second tranche of the Slack Fund, which last summer put $2M into 14 Slackbot startups when the App Directory stood at 600 apps. The fund itself dates to Slack's December 2015 platform push, when it opened the third-party App Directory alongside an $80M developer fund and shipped Botkit to lower the cost of building bots.
What has changed since then is what a 'bot' is expected to do: Slack added interactive buttons so bots could drive workflows rather than just answer commands, and nearly a decade later the same directory hosts paid AI agents from Salesforce, Asana, Cohere, and Adobe. These 11 investments are early stakes in the shelf space that evolution runs on.
First-order effects
- Eleven bot startups gain both capital and guaranteed placement in the Slack App Directory, where search, Salesforce integration, and workflow bots now sit one install away from every Slack team.
- Slack deepens its supply of directory content without building it in-house, keeping the fund's small checks doing distribution work rather than R&D.
Second-order effects
- Startups in this cohort that integrate Salesforce are wiring themselves into the vendor that would later become Slack's owner and agent supplier — the same axis behind Salesforce's generally available AI-powered Slackbot.
- As the directory fills with funded bots, discoverability becomes the scarce resource, pressuring Slack to keep refining navigation tools like the interactive buttons it introduced for developers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate venture funds tied to a platform become the standard mechanism for stocking an app ecosystem — capital as a moat around distribution.
- The bot makers Slack backed at the command-and-reply stage are positioned to graduate into the agent era, where Slack's own roadmap now centers on third-party and customer-built agents rather than simple bots.
The trend: Chat platforms are evolving from messaging clients into agent work surfaces, with platform-owned venture funds seeding the ecosystem that makes the surface sticky.