Improbable invests $10M in AI-powered business messaging app

UK tech company Improbable has launched its third product since shifting to venture building, bringing its AI messaging platform Bolter out of stealth with $10 million in funding from its own balance sheet.

Founded in London in 2012, Improbable raised $500 million from SoftBank in 2017. The company has since moved away from its gaming and metaverse infrastructure roots and now operates as a venture builder.

Under this model, Improbable provides seed funding to its own products, with the option for them to raise external investment in later funding rounds.

Bolter is being developed by a seven-person team and began as a personal project built by Improbable CEO and co-founder Herman Narula. The platform is an AI-native messaging tool designed to help non-technical teams automate business processes using plain-language instructions.

Its AI agents can plan tasks, discuss how to complete them and pass work between one another based on the user’s instructions, while the user sets the overall goal. Bolter is also positioning itself as a European alternative to major US technology platforms, arguing that Europe should develop its own leading messaging services.

The platform is model-agnostic, meaning it can route each request to the AI model it considers best suited to the specific task.

Bolter is the third product Improbable has brought out of stealth since adopting its venture-building strategy in 2023. Its previous ventures include blockchain platform Somnia and AI company Kallikor.

Narula said: "We know who we're competing with, and they are some of the biggest companies in the world. We don't know if we'll win, but we think a messaging platform built for mixed teams of humans and AI agents is worth attempting, and worth attempting in Europe. We've spent a decade running some of the most demanding real-time infrastructure in the world. Bolter is built on that experience, and it started as a project I coded myself because I wanted it to exist."