By Michael Bürgi • February 10, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
As generative AI wends its way deeper into the corners of the agency world, companies are making moves to own their own IP buildups and buildouts. Take CourtAvenue (CA), which Digiday has learned acquired a majority stake in Ukrainian AI bot firm Bots Crew, which sets up custom conversational AI solutions for enterprises, aka bot-driven chat functions, for a range of companies.
Bots Crew has helped to service a handful of CourtAvenue’s clients — as well as the agency’s internal bot functions — over the last 18 months, said Kenny Tomlin, CourtAvenue’s co-founder and partner. Their working relationship organically led to the acquisition, terms of which neither Tomlin nor Nazar Hembara, Bots Crew’s co-founder, would disclose. It’s estimated that the acquisition runs in the tens of millions of dollars.
Working mostly with U.S.-based clients including City of Chicago, Rutgers University and genetic testing company Natera, Bots Crew will be housed in the CourtAvenue Collective, an umbrella for the various companies it owns. The eight-year-old tech firm will remain standalone and continue to be run out of the Ukraine by its three co-founders, Hembara as well as CTO Oleh Pylypchak and CMO Max Gladysh.
Part of the value for CA is offering the AI-driven chat ability to its own clients. And the data those chat functions can gather can be valuable for the clients, who own that data.
“It’s one part understanding the LLMs and their power. But then there’s a whole other engineering layer on top of that, and a customer experience layer as well. That’s where I think the magic is going to happen for enterprises, and that’s the opportunity for us,” said Tomlin, who is contemplating whether to rebrand Bots Crew, due to the negative connotations around the word bot. “A lot of companies are trying to solve customer service and conversational commerce using intelligent chat bots. Bots Crew performs so well in search with SEO that we don’t want to change it, because they get a lot of inbound opportunities just in that particular category.”
“A typical use case is, for us, an automation of a customer service journey,” said Hembara. “So it’s building really tailored customer experiences powered by generative AI, so that we integrate deeply into customers’ CRM or any other systems they’re using.”
Hembara, who noted that Bots Crew’s 60-person team has been able to work largely without hindrance despite the war in Ukraine, said the acquisition opens the door for both companies to access clients the other doesn’t currently work with.
“There’s a lot of opportunities of offering services to CourtAvenue clients,” he said. “We can have and a TK quote much bigger presence in the U.S., as they support us on our pitches and our clients, because we are becoming part of a much bigger group than we are. And there are opportunities for our clients, or a lot of services that the Collective is offering that we are not offering to our clients.”
The CEO of another media agency who knows CourtAvenue’s leadership and offerings but wasn’t familiar with this deal, said it’s the data generated by a bot-driven offering that will deliver value for any client that uses Bots Crew.
“It’s the first time I’ve heard of an agency making that type of investment,” said the CEO, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak freely. “Now you can have a better form of integration into your total ecosystem, across the consumer journey. The data that they’re parsing out from the bots and the chat that’s happening — maybe they’re not getting anywhere else real time. From a business perspective, to say, ‘This product set seems to have more challenges than other products,’ That’s interesting data to have.”
https://digiday.com/?p=568161
