Motion AI raises $700,000 to expand artificial intelligence chatbot service
Featured on the Chicago Tribune
Artificial intelligence can help a chatbot answer a customer-service issue in a live chat, and a Naperville founder is hoping soon it can take your pizza order or answer basic questions about a business.
Motion AI wants to make it easier for retailers, restaurants or any company to offer chatbot service, and it has raised $700,000 to hire engineers to build out its tool for creating an artificial intelligence bot.
David Nelson, Motion AI’s founder, CEO and sole employee, said his company will allow users to create a visual conversation flow through drag-and-drop modules. Businesses will be able to design interactions that allow bots to take food orders, answer frequently asked questions or triage medical complaints, he said.
“Companies are really looking for ways to help increase efficiency and improve user experience … for answering some of the low-hanging-fruit type of question,” Nelson said.
His website offers a product demonstration. A pizza restaurant bot asks, “Will this be eat-in, delivery or carry out?” The user responds. The bot requests a first name, then asks whether the user would like a small, medium or large pizza. Next, it asks for a list of toppings. The bot summarizes the order, then directs the user to a full menu online.
Nelson said taking orders this way also can help businesses collect data that can be analyzed. For example, if dozens of customers are requesting an item not on the pizzeria’s menu, the owner could consider adding it. Nelson said it’s harder to collect such details when people take orders.
Motion AI will offer a free tier to users who stay below a certain messaging volume. Others will pay per inbound and outbound messages. The rates and volumes haven’t been determined, Nelson said.
He said he expects Motion AI to be widely available in six months, but he has 5,000 names on a waiting list — many of whom signed up when Motion AI rose to the top of Product Hunt, a product discovery site, in November — and hopes to get them up and running sooner.
Kristopher Kubicki, co-chair of the digital media and technology team at Hyde Park Angels and chief innovation officer of market research firm Market Track, said the Product Hunt listing was how his team discovered Motion AI. He said he was impressed by Nelson’s vision and track record.
Nelson, who grew up in the Quad Cities, built his first product, a streaming service called Muziic, at age 15. Now 22, he’s fresh off another business, FanRx, which managed social media for entertainment industry clients. Nelson described Muziic as more of a project than a business, and said FanRx reached about $1 million in total revenue.
Kubicki said Nelson’s AI solution, which he has built using open source technologies, is “incremental” compared with existing chatbots but he likes Nelson’s application of the technology to repetitive questions businesses face every day. “It’s a huge market, but it’s not too daunting of a task,” Kubicki said.
It’s an exciting time to be working in AI, Nelson said. Global technology leaders including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel this week announced plans for a nonprofit called OpenAI dedicated to supporting responsible artificial intelligence development, and Facebook is testing an AI-powered virtual assistant for its Messenger service.
Crush Ventures, a New York-based investment and advising firm, led the round. Chicago-based Hyde Park Angels and individual angels Andrew Fursman, CEO of computing optimization company 1QBit; Guy Gamzu, an Israeli angel investor, and Micha Kaufman, founder and CEO of online task marketplace Fiverr, also participated.