Just two months after buying Kemvi Inc. to give customers access to better market intelligence, HubSpot Inc. has picked up another startup.

The marketing automation giant this morning announced the acquisition of Motion AI Inc., a two-year-old chatbot development specialist. With the help of about $700,000 in seed funding, the startup has created a service that makes it possible to assemble a custom virtual assistant from prebuilt components.

Motion AI includes 11 “Modules” that each serve a different function. The most basic type provides the ability to display a message in the chat window, while the others are designed to handle more advanced tasks such as extracting an email address from a reply. Users can arrange Modules in any order they see fit and add custom prompts based on their project requirements.

Although this approach limits what can be done with the platform, it makes developing the most common types of chatbots fairly simple. Motion AI enables business workers to build virtual assistants that book meetings, collect feedback and answer product inquiries among others.

Those bots can then be published to a wide range of platforms. Motion AI works with Facebook Messenger, Slack, SMS and can be embedded into a company’s website as well. The service has so far been used to create more than 80,000 chatbots across the different mediums.

Motion AI’s clients, which include electronics giant Sony Corp., will move over to HubSpot in the wake of the acquisition. As for the chatbot service, it will be integrated into the company’s flagship marketing automation toolkit. The plan, HubSpot executive Brad Coffey told VentureBeat, is to let virtual assistants draw on the customer data in its platform to improve interactions.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. It adds HubSpot to the growing list of established tech companies that have bought their way into the chatbot development segment.

Previously, remote access provider LogMeIn Inc. joined the fray by acquiring Nanorep Technologies Ltd. for $45 million. And earlier, Google LLC picked up a startup called API.AI Inc. that focused on helping virtual assistants better interpret natural-language input.

Image: Motion AI