Botpress raises $25m as Quebec's Sylvain Perron pitches his startup as the 'infrastructure layer' for AI agents
The Montreal company has dropped its chatbot roots to chase a bigger prize: becoming the plumbing every business relies on to put autonomous AI agents into production.
Botpress has closed a $25m Series B, worth more than $34m in Canadian dollars, at a $120m post-money valuation. The all-equity round was led by Toronto's Framework Venture Partners, with new backers Deloitte Ventures and HubSpot Ventures joining alongside existing investors Inovia Capital and Decibel Partners. The financing brings total funding to $45m and more than doubles the $50m post-money valuation the company carried after its 2021 Series A. Framework partner and chief technology officer Jim Texier is joining the board.
The repositioning is the real story. Founded in 2017 by Sylvain Perron and Justin Watson on the hypothesis that computers would one day speak and operate software like humans, Botpress began life as an open-source chatbot tool. It now sells itself as infrastructure for building and deploying autonomous AI agents. The argument is that large language models have cracked reasoning while leaving the hard parts unsolved, namely safe execution, orchestration, memory management and tool integration. Those gaps are exactly what fuels the sprawl of unmanaged "shadow AI" that worries enterprise security teams.
Perron has drawn a deliberate line between Botpress and the wave of AI demos that never reach production. "From day one, we've been focused on building a platform that actually works in production," he said, contrasting the company's emphasis on reliability and technical depth with rivals chasing proof-of-concept tools. The reliability gap is not theoretical: a KPMG report on agentic AI was itself found riddled with AI hallucinations. Botpress serves customers across fintech, IT, consumer tech and logistics, and now bills model usage as a separate "AI Spend" line on top of its subscription plans.
The capital funds an aggressive year. Botpress plans to roughly double its 65-person team, open a European office and data centre and ship voice capabilities in the coming quarter. The company has positioned itself as product-led and capital-efficient, a notable stance in a sector where rivals have raised vastly more. As the agentic AI race intensifies and enterprises grow impatient with pilots that stall, Botpress is betting that the winners will not be the flashiest agents but the firms quietly supplying the runtime everyone else builds on. The land grab is fierce at the top of the market too, with IBM's consulting chief warning AI will "implode" unprepared rivals and demand riding a broader AI infrastructure boom.