When it comes to bots, no one has more variety than Slack. More than 500 bots populate the popular messaging platform.
This activity has naturally led to an interest in companies creating bots. Since the launch of its $80 million Slack Fund in Dec. 2015 – backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Spark Growth and Social Capital – the company has invested in 25 bot startups. Among them, as of last week, is Sway Finance. The startup developed a bot, which aims to keep users up to date with a company’s financial health directly through Slack commands.
Through connecting to a firm’s bank accounts, payment processors and accounting software (Quickbooks, specifically, with Xero to be added “soon”), Sway spits out an overall financial report. Commands can prompt the bot to provide reports on revenues and expenses at a given period of time, or show deposits, cash flows, and cash balances, among other things. The bot also offers a daily or weekly digest that provides users with a financial snapshot.
The bot is currently free to use, but Sway is working on paid features, “such as bank reconciliation through our app, and are planning to launch those in 2017,” according to the company website. The app supports most financial institutions in the U.S. and all Stripe accounts, with PayPal to be added soon.
Voice-chat platform Synervoz, an analytics app Statsbot, and Troops, which imports Salesforce data, are among the latest investments from the Slack Fund, and the latest additions to its lineup of bots (if none of those seem appealing, there’s always the CatFacts bot). “The Slack Fund backs new companies that bring more streamlined workflows to Slack—reducing the small, yet high-frequency tasks that consume chunks of our time,” the company said in a recent blogpost.