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Wit.Al funding, valuation and investors
Natural language API for voice and text interfaces (acquired by Facebook 2015).
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Funding, valuation & investors
Answer-first snapshotLatest funding
Seed
$3M · October 2014
Latest known valuation
Not publicly disclosed
Total disclosed equity funding
$3M
Excludes debt, grants, acquisitions, secondaries, and IPO proceeds.
Current status
acquired
acquired
Overview
Wit.ai provided a free API for developers to add natural language understanding to apps and devices — parsing speech and text into structured intents. Founded by Alexandre Lebrun (who previously sold VirtuOz to Nuance), Wit.ai went through Y Combinator W2014 and raised a $3M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz in October 2014. In January 2015, Facebook acquired Wit.ai; the platform remained open and free, supporting Messenger and Facebook developer tools.
Why Wit.Al is interesting
Wit.ai open-sourced NLP for bot builders — a16z $3M seed, then Facebook bought it in 3 months as Messenger platform raced to add voice interfaces.
Product & use cases
Wit.ai API converted natural language (voice or text) into structured data for app actions — community-shared training data model.
- Developers building voice-controlled apps and bots
- Facebook Messenger third-party bot NLP (post-acquisition)
- IoT devices needing lightweight speech understanding
Key facts
- Acquired by Facebook (Jan 2015) ~3 months after seed
- Seed (Oct 2014): $3M led by a16z; NEA participated
- 6,000+ developers on platform at acquisition
- Platform remained open and free post-acquisition
Funding history (newest first)
Investors in our directory
Funds linked from Wit.Al's profile — open a fund page for stage focus and related deal articles.
Competitive landscape
Edge: Open, community-trained NLP platform with free tier — developer adoption (6,000+ developers at acquisition) drove Facebook interest.
Bot platform NLP became feature of cloud giants; Wit.ai's fast Facebook exit rewarded developer traction in 2015 messenger bot wave.
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Dialogflow (Google) direct
Cloud NLP for bots.
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Amazon Lex direct
AWS bot builder with speech recognition.
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Nuance incumbent
Enterprise speech; Lebrun's prior exit.
Notable stories
- Facebook bought Wit.ai just months after a16z's seed — David Marcus's Messenger team wanted NLP infrastructure as bot platform launched (TechCrunch, 2015).
Industries
Related funding articles
Venture Capital Tracker pieces that cover Wit.Al's financing or category context.
FAQs about Wit.Al
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