The global chatbot market is expected to reach USD 1.25 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 24.3%, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. There are already both large players in the chatbot market, including Baidu, Poncho, Kik, WeChat, Money Inc, ReplyYes and SRI International, as well as smaller companies, already providing chatbot marketplaces, such as BotMakers Chatbot Marketplace and BotList.
As of December 2017, MVP has not been launched and is expected to be launched in January 2018 with limited functionality, providing the bot identification tools only. As the commercial product is not available yet it is hard to evaluate it further. The roadmap of the product development provided by the team in WP seems too general and does not have enough specifics to analyze the feasibility of product development. As the service can only be accessed using BOT tokens, the potential customer base for Botchain might be smaller. Botchain will charge fees for the services. However, the team does not provide the commission level or any related specifics. That is why the commercial viability of the platform is not clear.
Botcoin does not clarify the exact amount of issued tokens. The WP and BitcoinTalk forum tells about 30M BOT tokens, while on the ICO website they tell about 40M BOT tokens. The required investment ($22.5M) is significantly above the average size of the round of companies at the same stage. ($2M, According to Pitchbook). The team and advisors tokens reservation will be then around $11.25M and $15M which seems excessive, especially because the reserves are not tight to any KPI. The team does not provide any financial forecasts or assumptions for their growth. Botchain does not provide costs structure. Therefore, it is hard to say something specific about their financial model. The length of the ICO, the token delivery date, the exchanges where token might be listed is not given. The issued token – BOT token – will be used to pay for the services provided in system. The team gives some examples of use cases but this list is not complete and is subject to change.
The team has previous experience of working together at Talla – A.I. powered startup that raised already $12.3M. However, this focus on two projects at the same time might jeopardize growth opportunities for Botchain. The Blockchain architect – Matt Conway – is on freelance and is not employed at Botchain. The core team lacks marketing and sales people. This can slower the expansion of Botchain.
