I am extremely excited to announce XOXCO has agreed to be acquired by Microsoft.
When Katie Spence and I started this company, the idea of chatbots and other talking computers was just beginning to get attention in the tech world. We found a developer ecosystem hungry for resources — searching for tools, tutorials, or well-defined best practices. It was like the early days of the web…an exciting wild west of new technology and fresh opportunity!
With that in mind, we set out to help fill the world with friendly, helpful robots. We asked ourselves, “What if we could give people most of a bot, and let them fill in the details with simple building blocks?”
“What if we could give people most of a bot, and let them fill in the details with simple building blocks?”
In late 2015, we released Howdy, the first commercially-available bot add-on for Slack. A few months later, we released Botkit, an open source set of building blocks for building bots. As momentum built around bots, we organized a one-of-a-kind convocation of bot enthusiasts in Austin, Texas called Talkabot. The community of bot builders around us grew and grew!
Today, Botkit is used by hundreds of thousands of developers across GitHub for building chat bots, apps and custom integrations for major messaging platforms. The community of developers and contributors spans the globe and has brought new features, new plugins and new expertise to the project. The open source projects are installed thousands of times a week connecting customized bots to platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Webex and Twilio SMS. Botkit was even hailed by Github as a great way for developers to get started with open source. We couldn’t be prouder of the momentum to date.
Microsoft already offers a rich set of tools and resources for bot builders through its Azure Bot Service. We are eager to explore bringing together the best of both offerings to Botkit developers, and I’m excited to see what we will achieve as the leading community of open source bot developers in the world!
This signals a bright future for bots and bot builders and is a deep commitment from myself and everyone involved to creating an open platform to build this exciting new type of software. I am excited to begin this new phase with Microsoft!
For more information, please visit the Official Microsoft Blog.
Finally, there was a group of amazing investors and supporters who believed in us and helped us get to where we are today and I want to thank them for their belief in our ability. Thank you, everyone!
