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Following the acquisition, Slack plans to offer Rimeto’s solution as a standalone app that will remain available to non-Slack customers.
On Wednesday (8 July), Slack announced that it has acquired San Francisco-based enterprise directory start-up Rimeto.
Founded in 2016 by Maxwell Hayman, Neville Bowers and Ted Zagat, the start-up will now integrate its advanced profile and directory features directly into Slack.
A ‘powerful cultural tool’
With Rimeto, each employee gets an advanced profile that compiles all of the information about them, their areas of expertise, their focus areas, the languages they speak and their interests.
The goal is to ensure that employees can easily get to know and understand each other, as well as enabling organisations to enhance their relationships and tap into collective knowledge.
Slack described Rimeto’s solution as a “powerful cultural tool” that can help strengthen employee ties to each other and to their work.
The acquiring company believes that this solution is particularly important now that people are struggling to stay connected while working remotely.
The acquisition
Slack explained that it acquired Rimeto with the knowledge that employees with weak social ties to their colleagues aren’t as “happy or productive” as employees at companies with a “thriving, healthy culture”.
The workplace communication platform noted that typical enterprise directories are about as valuable as phone books and are usually less informative.
According to Forbes, the acquiring company is planning to offer Rimeto as a standalone app, which will also remain available to non-Slack customers.
Slack wrote: “Rimeto offers an enterprise-wide, searchable directory, automatically integrating information from across your company to deliver rich profiles of every employee, their skills, experience and current projects. It’s a natural fit with Slack.”
Ted Zagat, co-founder of Rimeto said: “We’ve been on a mission to help everyone easily find and understand their colleagues – and all of the groups, teams and projects within their organisation.
“Joining Slack is a special opportunity to accelerate the impact and reach of the product we’ve spent years building. We couldn’t be more excited to help make Slack an even better platform for bringing human connection and collaboration to life.”
In Rimeto’s company statement, the start-up said that it will now be bringing its capabilities to 750,000 organisations using Slack, including 65 of the Fortune 100.
Prior to the acquisition, Rimeto had raised $10m in Series A funding in 2019, from investors including USVP, Bow Capital, Floodgate and Ray Dalio.
Neither of the companies disclosed the terms of the acquisition.
