The competition among Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Alexa, and Facebook’s M (still in its early stages), has kept the spotlight on virtual assistants for the last couple of years. The assistants and the AI technologies that power them have piqued the interest of venture capitalists as well.
“Having written a bad version of ELIZA [an early-stage natural language processing program] as one of my earliest programs, I have been excited about the prospect of conversing with machines for a long time. So I will be watching this development closely…” Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger wrote in his blog.
We’ve identified 21 startups working in the virtual assistant space or providing underlying technology to power digital assistants that either received either Series B, Series A, or seed/angel funds since 2015. This post was updated on 6/15/2016 adding 7 startups, includingJulie Desk and Ozlo, to the list.
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