AI and bot companies: Amaze us at the MobileBeat 2016 Innovation Showcase

Today we’re opening the application process for the Innovation Showcase, one of the highlights of the MobileBeat event on July 12-13 in SF.

We’re searching for the six most promising new artificial intelligence and bot companies that solve real problems.

The idea is to showcase the significant potential of bots, now that an array of technologies — predictive analytics, natural language processing, and other artificial intelligence advances — are ushering in valuable new services in an easy, chat-style user interface.

We’re seeing advances in both text and voice, and are looking for submission in both areas.

We’re looking for entries from companies in two categories:

1. Early, i.e., late seed stage to early series A that have raised $500,000 to $3 million, and
2. Mid-Stage, i.e., raised at least a series A or series B round totaling more than $3 million in funding.

We prefer products that will be launching for the first time at MobileBeat.

If you’re interested, please apply here.

MobileBeat will be the first major event about the new paradigm shift to AI and conversational UI. It will also be the first independent meet-up after the string of platform launches from giants like Facebook, Google, Slack, and Apple (Apple’s event is coming next month, but we just broke the news about what appears to be Apple’s exciting voice-activated assistant, a competitor to Amazon Echo.)

We’re inviting a who’s who of the new AI and bot ecosystem to attend and debate what platforms and technologies are working — and which ones aren’t. We’ll have over 700 attendees, including product, marketing, and engineering executives; press; and investors. Incidentally, we’ve just opened the first batch of 100 tickets for the event (so get them while they last).

The Facebook announcement last month provoked tens of thousands of developers to start building bots for Facebook Messenger. Since then, we’ve been seeing a surge of very interesting bots, including one that aims to run an entire country (which will be demoed for the first time at MobileBeat). We’ll have more announcements to unveil at the event too, from established brands. Even if you’re not a startup, but have something interesting in the area of AI and bots to announce, you should get in touch with us right away.

More details about other fun stuff at the event here. To be clear, this Innovation Showcase is different from the nationwide botathon we’re planning, which is a separate part of the event.

Each of the six finalists will have five minutes to showcase live at MobileBeat on the main stage.

The application deadline is Friday, June 10, at 11:59 a.m. Pacific.

To apply for the Innovation Showcase, please fill out an application here.