https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/11/rasa-raises-13m-led-by-accel-for-its-developer-friendly-open-source-approach-to-chatbots/

Conversational AI and the use of chatbots have been through multiple cycles of hype and disillusionment in the tech world. You know the story: first you get a launch from the likes of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google or any number of other companies, and then you get the many examples of how their services don’t work as intended at the slightest challenge. But time brings improvements and more focused expectations, and today a startup that has been harnessing all those learnings is announcing funding to take its own approach to conversational AI to the next level.

Rasa, which has built an open source platform for third parties to design and manage their own conversational (text or voice) AI chatbots, is today announcing that it has raised $13 million in a Series A round of funding led by Accel, with participation also from Basis Set Ventures, Greg Brockman (Co-founder & CTO OpenAI), Daniel Dines (Founder & CEO UiPath) and Mitchell Hashimoto (Co-founder & CTO Hashicorp). Rasa was founded in Berlin, but with this round, it be moving its headquarters to San Francisco with a plan to hire more people there in sales, marketing and business development; and to continue its tech development with its roadmap including plans to expand the platform to cover images, too.