Slack founder Stewart Butterfield in Dublin, November 2015
Next-generation business communications platform Slack has raised $200m in a massive funding round that now values the company at $3.8bn.
The latest round was led by Thrive Capital, existing investors Accel and Social Capital, as well as GGV and Comcast Ventures.
The company, which is creating 100 new jobs in Dublin, is revolutionising how businesses work and communicate, taking the social tools young workers have become accustomed to and right-sizing them for the workplace in a fun and engaging way.
The latest funding round brings to $540m the amount that Slack has raised so far.
Not bad for a two-year-old company that has grown to amass 2.7m daily active users out of which 800,000 are paying.
In December, the company revealed how it has created an $80m venture fund to back companies focused on creating apps for the Slack ecosystem.
Slack was founded by Canadian Stewart Butterfield. The platform emerged from a project management tool for Glitch, a gaming company that Butterfield shuttered in 2012.
Prior to Slack Butterfield co-founded image-sharing site Flickr in 2002 with Caterina Fake and Jason Classon, originally as a video games business. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 and Butterfield stayed on as product manager for three years.
Slack has quickly become the tool of choice for a growing number of creators, designers, entrepreneurs and software developers and is growing to become a mainstream productivity tool for businesses.
Interview with Slack’s April Underwood (video)
