General Catalyst's Phil Libin says first bot IPOs are 2 or 3 years away – VentureBeat

VentureBeat sat down with Phil Libin, managing director at venture capital firm General Catalyst, to get his take on the state of the bot ecosystem. It was just a year ago that the former Evernote CEO joined General Catalyst as a partner. Since then, chatbots and conversational interfaces have roared into the technology mainstream, with hundreds of companies attracting more than 4 billion in funding to make thousands and thousands of bots and conversational UIs for platforms like Messenger, Slack, Alexa, and Allo, to name just a few. In April, Libin made his first investment in Begin, a stealth bot startup. And a few months later, Libin announced investments in Growbot and Butter.ai,