Launched in 2013, Slack provides a workplace communications platform that centralizes team messaging and integrates with many third-party apps. The product’s easy interface and broad integrations have driven adoption, giving it more than 8 million daily active users and 70,000 paying teams. The company has been expanding beyond small startups, acquiring competitors like HipChat and ramping up offerings to target larger, more lucrative customers. Slack faces rising competition from large tech firms such as Facebook and Microsoft but continues to scale its product and customer base. Management has described fundraising as opportunistic and the company is making money and holding cash, per past statements. The company did not specify how it will deploy the new capital in its brief statement to TechCrunch. Slack is an enterprise instant-messaging service with a modern interface and third-party integrations (including Giphy) used widely for internal communication. The company positions itself as an alternative to email but is not a platform for communicating with people outside a company. Slack has developed a strong following in Silicon Valley, though wider success depends on convincing large enterprises to switch. There have been reports of acquisition conversations, but at least one source says talks never came close to finalizing a deal. Financially, Slack is raising a $250 million round at a $5 billion valuation and has disclosed over $500 million in equity funding to date. Investors appear to believe the company has significant exit potential, by acquisition or public markets. Slack is a San Francisco-based business messaging startup that provides team chat, integrated apps, and chatbots designed to reduce email. The three-year-old company counts corporate customers such as NASA, LinkedIn and Spotify and reports 2.7 million daily users and 430 employees. Slack has seen 3.5X user growth in the past year and benefits from a strong network effect and developer ecosystem. The company raised $200 million at a $3.8 billion post-money valuation, bringing total funding to $540 million. Management says the capital will help secure its leadership position and support long-term strategic growth; Slack is also working on rolling out voice chat and building video chat, and may use funds for acquisitions, hires, and R&D. Slack is a team communication application that centralizes messages, videos, and images for organizations and integrates services such as Dropbox, Twitter and Google Drive. Launched in February 2014 by CEO Stewart Butterfield and based in San Francisco, the platform is used by over 750,000 daily active users. Slack raised $160M in a new funding round that valued the company at $2.8 billion. Backers in the round included Horizons Ventures, Digital Sky Technologies (DST Global), Index Ventures, Spark Capital Growth and Institutional Venture Partners. The company said it will use the funds to continue to develop the platform and expand operations. Slack is also massively hiring to support growth and expansion. Slack is an enterprise collaboration platform co-founded by Stewart Butterfield that centralizes team communication. It began as a by-product of Butterfield's earlier gaming startup Glitch and emerged from beta earlier this year. The product consolidates team communications into one searchable place and offers free and paid tiers that increase capacity for users. Slack reports 30,000 active teams, more than 73,000 daily active users registered as paid seats, and over 200 million messages sent each month. The company says it is pulling in $1 million in monthly recurring revenue. Slack plans to use the funding to sustain momentum and accelerate growth over the next 6 to 18 months, according to Butterfield. As part of the investment, KPCB's John Doerr and GV's M.G. Siegler are joining Slack's board as observers.

Total raised

$1.2B

Funding rounds

6

Latest round

Series H

Latest activity

Aug 2018