Last week, we had our 4 ELEVATE chatbot teams pitch in front of 100+ VCs and business angels as part of our accelerator program. Why? Because we believe in the team members, their concept and their business spirit. As proud (bot) parents usually do, we also want to show off our kids. That’s why we decided to share the success stories of our 4 amazing teams with you. They started off with a prototype – after 6 months, things look a bit different:
Toni
The idea behind Toni arose last year for the European Football Championship 2016 when Klemens built the first prototype. During ELEVATE, the team decided to expand the business model to Toni.ai – a platform for white-label sports chatbots. This also caught the attention of LAOLA1.at – Austria’s biggest sports portal. After some meetings, Toni.ai was able to happily announce their new partnership! Toni.ai now powers the new LAOLA1.at chatbot, which has an impressive 30% retention rate after two weeks, with the average user opening ten articles per day. Toni.ai was further able to attract LAOLA1.at and Sportradar as content partner, therewith gaining access to massive amounts of highly relevant sports data. After successfully launching their proof of concept, they are eager to work with sports clubs as B2B customers.
IconicBot
IconicBot is a chatbot that bridges the gap between celebrity icons and their fans. Vishakha and Sandesh flew in all the way from India to participate in the ELEVATE meetups. They started off building their first chatbot for Vishakha herself as she is a famous actress and film producer in India with a fanbase of more than 1 Million users. After a successful launch, IconicBot already was able to win their first paying customer – Sri Thenandal Studios Ltd, a big film production company in India. IconicBot designed an AI-based chatbot to promote ‚Mersal’, which is considered one of the most-awaited films of 2017 in India. Combined with their two independent celebrity bots, IconicBot gained access to more than 9 Million Facebook users. Their bots processed already almost 1.7 Million messages. Vishakha was also accepted to the ‚She Leads Tech’ Initiative of Facebook and FB start, which further increases their network of business partners. Their next steps are to reach out to more celebrities and the big film & media houses.
Selly
Selly sells the stuff you no longer need. Despite being only 20 years old, Viktor and Vincent know how to do business. Besides ELEVATE, they were accepted for the LMU Lab, an incubator program in Munich that counts success cases such as Foodora and Flixbus as their alumni. Viktor and Vincent launched their bot Selly during the Demo Day. They used Viral Loops to already create a waiting list for interested people until their bot was ready to take orders. Users were able to move up the waiting list for each friend they invited. People were so eager to use Selly that over 25% of people shared it with their friends and the waiting list was filled with more than 230 potential orders after 3 weeks. They now focus on converting these numbers to orders and are currently in talks with several investors.
Jingle
Jingle, now consisting of Luke, Greg and Kevin, made it their goal to re-invent local shopping. The company came to life in August 2016 and as with most start-ups, Jingle had its ups and downs. However, through participating in incubation programs such as the WKO rocket science academy and as a team at the INiTS start-up camp, Jingle showed continuous progress. During their time at ELEVATE, Luke and Greg found their perfect fit with Kevin and hired him as CTO. At the Demo Day, they were able to convince the crowd and were awarded the ‘community award’ for the best pitch. This further encouraged talks with potential investors & partners. Luke, Greg & Kevin also received an invitation to share their knowledge and hold a keynote for the Handelsverband Österreich. Many people and retailers have expressed their interest in working with Jingle, which will be their main focus point for the upcoming weeks.
So what do you think? It’s a pretty great bot family we’ve been growing those past 6 months, right? We could not be prouder and cannot wait to see what their future holds! And now: on to Batch #2 – let’s see what the next 6 months will bring!
