Slack offices in Dublin. Image: John Kennedy
Despite the seductive attention of many tech giants, Slack hasn’t been wooed and appears to be raising cash on its own terms.
Business communications platform Slack is understood to be in the midst of raising $500m in a round that values it at around $5bn in a post-money valuation.
This is despite receiving recent attentions from various tech major players including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.
‘Slack will be a company that will be around for decades’
– CAL HENDERSON
Yesterday, it emerged that Amazon was eyeing Slack up and was considering a $9bn bid for the company.
However, Recode cited sources that while the companies have been interested in Slack for a long time, no formal offers have yet been received.
A work tool for the ages
Slack is transforming the enterprise, bringing communications tools and apps to a millennial workforce that grew up on social media and smartphones.
The platform – which integrates with other powerful work tools such as Dropbox, Trello, Asana, Stripe and Google Docs, to name a few – has 6.8m active users, 5m daily active users and 1.5m-plus paid users.
Slack, which is headed by Stewart Butterfield, is creating 100 new jobs in Dublin this year. It aims to revolutionise how businesses work and communicate, taking the social tools that young workers have become accustomed to and right-sizing them for the workplace in a fun and engaging way.
Last year, Slack raised $200m in a massive funding round that valued the company at $3.8bn. So far, it has raised $540m from some of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley.
Earlier this year, it emerged that Irish woman Sarah Friar, CFO at e-commerce firm Square, was appointed to the board of Slack.
In an interview with Siliconrepublic.com in recent months, Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson was emphatic: “Slack will be a company that will be around for decades and we still feel the same. We want to work on it as long as it remains an exciting challenge and stays interesting. It has to be interesting.”
