Matrix Partners’ latest bet is a botmaker riding on an 800-pound gorilla called Slack

Photo credit: Anaek

Over 9 million people actively talk work and collaborate via Slack in a week. Over 2 million of them are paid users. This team communication tool took less than four years to grow from an internal app at a small tech company to an 800-pound gorilla valued at well over US$5 billion, clocking annual recurring revenue of US$200 million as it made work communication seem easy and fun.

Riding on this poster boy is botmaker Anaek – the latest investment in India by Matrix Partners – which believes that the folks on Slack can be happier and more productive if freed from low-value tasks.

Anaek has Slackbots that automate attendance tracking, expense filing, and other office management tasks.

For example, if you tell Anaek’s AttendanceBot: “I am on leave tomorrow,” the bot will instantly compute the date, send a message to your manager to approve the leave request, and update the attendance register after deducting a day’s off from your quota of annual leave. You can also ask the bot simple questions like: “Is Sharon on leave tomorrow?” – so you don’t have to bother your colleague with work requests on their off day. The bot can automatically sync your leave application with your company’s leave calendar on Google – that is, if it uses Google Calendar. You can also tell the bot to set up your out-of-office messages.

These are some of the tasks that the bot does. Anaek has been customizing it with additional features for its larger clients which have had specific requirements. For example, a large company in California wanted AttendanceBot to make daily announcements about who’s on leave that day to help the team plan their workday better.

Anaek’s AttendanceBot is featured as one of the “Brilliant Bots” on the homepage of the Slack App Directory – which is how a large chunk of its users discovered the product, co-founder Kanav Abrol tells Tech in Asia.

Vote of confidence

Slack had around 2 million daily users and 570,000 paying customers in December 2015 when it launched its App Directory with 150 integrations, including Twitter, Google Drive, Dropbox, and so on, that can be installed on a team’s Slack. It also released a suite of APIs, including open-source framework BotKit, to make it easier for others to build new apps and chatbots on top of Slack.

A cherry on top was an US$80 million fund to back developers and small companies building apps for Slack. “The more apps we get people to install [within Slack], the more likely they are to keep using Slack,” said Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s founder and CEO, outlining the company’s strategy.

Those moves spawned over a thousand Slack apps and bots across diverse categories from analytics to travel, social, and fun. So even for a specific task like leave tracking, there are scores of apps like TimeBot, Timetastic, LeaveBot, and so on. That does not unnerve Anaek’s Abrol. “Building a basic bot is not difficult. Just like how it’s quite easy today to build an Android app. The challenge is how do you build a bot that is better than the basic bot,” he says.

Screenshot of the home page of Slack’s App Directory on the date of publishing.

He points out that all three of Anaek’s paid products – AttendanceBot, ExpenseTron, and OfficeAmp – have been featured by Slack on the home page of its directory. “Each of them is in the top 10 under its respective category,” Abrol says, adding that being featured by Slack saves a lot of their cost of customer acquisition.

That’s how Anaek could afford to price their products aggressively.

Cutting work about work