Botcamp, our accelerator for early stage companies building chat-based products, finished in September 2016. Betaworks was joined by The Chernin Group to invest in each of the companies. Our program partners were GE, KPCB, General Catalyst, Atomico, RRE, and Breaking News (a part of NBC News).

The program was Betaworks’ first accelerator and sparked the creation of the camp program--a series of thematically-driven accelerators for startups building products in fronteir technologies. Since Botcamp, Betaworks has continued to run camp programs whose themes reflect the areas on which we are most focused and that evolve with our investment theses.

At Betaworks we have seen conversational interfaces become a new mobile design paradigm. We have been building, investing, and researching this area for some time, all reinforced and highlighted in the notifications work we did in the fall of 2015. From Poncho, a messaging based weather service, to GIPHY bot in Slack, to the Digg news search bot, chat bots are establishing the most convenient way to interact with the services and media you love. Together with our partners, we aim to continue to accelerate the bot ecosystem.

The above mentioned partners were joined by leading players in the ecosystem as mentors to help the development of participating companies. Those included tech platforms and media companies such as Twitter, Microsoft, Slack, Facebook, Amazon Alexa, Line, Kik, Discord, Skype, WeChat, and NYTimes. Venture capitalists like Greylock, SV Angel, Eniac, Lerer Hippeay Ventures, Lightspeed, Greycroft, Bloomberg Beta, BodGroup, Homebrew, Slow Ventures, and Lowercase Capital.

What is Botcamp?

Botcamp is an eleven-week program for a select group of bot builders that began in July, 2016 and concluded in September 2016. During that time participating companies worked with Betaworks and leading thinkers on chatbots, conversational interfaces, and AI. The Betaworks team, along with industry partners, work with the teams on product, platform integration, data science, branding, and fundraising.

Next Camp?

We are currently accepting applications for Synthetic Camp, our upcoming 11 week in-residence program kicking off in February 2019. We are particularly interested in companies building around:

• deep tech and tools for creating synthetic media
• detection systems for artificially created or modified media
• consumer applications that enable new modes of entertainment or connection

If you are building in one of these areas, please apply here.