Network of partners will collaborate to foster adoption of artificial intelligence

Boston, MA | June 25, 2018

BotChain, the universal ledger for verified bot registration on the blockchain, announced partnerships with Passage AI and SEED. All three organizations share a common goal: heightening trust, transparency and collaboration in the AI ecosystem. Together, they are committed to leveraging the power of blockchain to advance these goals. These partnerships further the value of BotChain’s platform, value and its purpose as a decentralized source of verifiable AI developer and machine identity.

Passage AI is joining a community of established BotChain partners and developers who have all agreed to register their AI bots so that end-users can verify and trust the machines with which they are engaging. Passage AI enables companies to build AI-powered chatbots utilizing natural language processing, natural language understanding and deep learning alongside its bot development tools. By agreeing to register their bots, end users would have an ability to verify both the identity of the bot and the accuracy of the data exchanged. Passage AI’s platform is currently being used by companies such as Kohl’s, PwC and Udacity.

“We are helping companies build and deploy highly useful and accurate conversational AI experiences with our platform and it is important that those experiences provide users with a sense of trust and transparency,” said Ravi N. Raj, CEO and co-founder of Passage AI. “BotChain enables a trusted experience that can enhance the end-user’s relationship with AI. We are partnering with BotChain to deliver on that expectation.”

CEO of BotChain, Rob May, commented, “As we look at a world increasingly penetrated by bot-to-human interaction, the AI community needs to deploy universal infrastructure to decrease some of the trust and security issues causing mainstream concerns around the technology. At BotChain, we see the opportunity for blockchain protocols to fill gaps in the existing infrastructure, namely around identity and trust, which are hindering the ability for enterprises to adopt AI.”

BotChain’s partnership with SEED will explore ways for BotChain’s identity validation standards to be integrated into SEED’s decentralized marketplace for conversational user interfaces. The SEED token and network are designed to create a thriving economy of conversational interfaces while enabling users to control their personal data; both the token and network are uniquely designed to support authentication, smart contracts, payments, and ratings in order to reward quality, positive actors in the SEED economy and guard against negative ones. BotChain and SEED will also look for ways for their networks, technologies and tokens to interoperate.

“BotChain and SEED’s shared goals are an obvious complement to one another, and can bring greater maturity to the entire AI market. This is the foundation of the third web (and the fourth industrial revolution), and it enables a maturation of the market based on the foundation of society: trust, transparency and fairness.” Mark Stephen Meadows, Co-founder and Trustee of SEED shared.

In addition to Passage AI and SEED, BotChain has secured a critical mass of aligned partners, including Gupshup and Botkit, both are platforms for developers, and B2B enterprise bot developers Howdy.ai, Polly, CareerLark, Disco (formerly Growbot), Zoom.ai, and Botkeeper. Together, BotChain’s partners represent 50,000 developers, over 150,000 enterprise and consumer facing bots, 400 million end users, and 4 billion monthly interactions.

About BotChain

Striving to create a universal bot registry that verifies bot identity, audits interactions, and controls the boundaries of bot autonomy, BotChain offers bot developers, enterprises, software companies, and system integrators the critical systems, standards, and means to validate, certify, and manage the millions of bots and billions of transactions powered by AI. Leveraging blockchain to post a record of all bot activities on a common, shared, widely-viewable, and secure ledger, BotChain looks to incentivize bot innovation and adoption. To learn more about BotChain, please visit www.botchain.network.

About Passage AI

Founded in 2016 by Walmart Labs alumni Madhu Mathihalli and Ravi Raj and LinkedIn alumnus Mitul Tiwari, Passage AI enables businesses to harness the power of AI-enabled conversational interfaces to bring bottom-line benefits, to better utilize service agents saddled by mundane tasks, and to deliver exceptional customer experience. Passage AI counts Kohl’s, Udacity and PwC among the business and services that use its solution. A 2018 TiE50 award winner, the company has secured $10.3 million in total funding and is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. More information can be found at http://www.passage.ai.

About SEED

SEED is an independent, decentralized marketplace for developers and deployers of conversational user interfaces (CUIs). Our platform provides development tools, intellectual property, and network for deploying front-ends to AI technologies. Blockchain enables us to authenticate CUIs and compensate developers for their creations and contributions. More information can be found at seedtoken.io.