Slack raises $120M, now valued at $1.12B
Slack, the wildly popular work chat application, has raised additional funding of $120 million from all existing investors and some new ones, like David Sacks (founder and former CEO of Yammer), Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Google Ventures, bringing investment to $180 million. Tbe post-funding valuation is $1.12 billion.
The company is showing blistering growth: over 30,000 companies have signed up since the February launch, and that number has doubled in the past 10 weeks. More than 200 million messages are sent daily. More than 73,000 of the daily active users are paid seats, and the company is adding $1 million in ARR every week.
This looks to be the fastest growing enterprise software-as-a-service company to date.
I’ve written about the company many times, as in Contextual conversation: Work chat will dominate collaboration, and Work conversation tool Slack raises $43M. As I said in February, when the product launched,
Slack is the conversational tool from Tiny Speck, founded by Stewart Butterfield of Flickr fame. He signed up 8,000 companies in the first 24 hours after the launch in August, and it is intended to be more than just a chat utility. It also serves as a file manager — based on its search, it’s much better than storing anything on your hard drive –and as a Yammerish work media tool. But his aspirations are greater: he wants Slack to be the social layer for a company’s information flow on tools like Dropbox, Zendesk, Heroku, and Helpscout, where the messages from those apps would surface in appropriate chats on Slack.
Two people I really admire — John Doerr, general partner of KPCB, and M.G. Siegler, general partner of Google Ventures — will be taking observer seats on the board of directors.
Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield, CEO and founder of Slack, seems eager to grow the company, saying
The world is in the very early stages of a 100 year shift in how people communicate, and we’re determined to push the boundaries. As the leader of a brand new product category, we have a huge advantage right now. These next 6 to 18 months are going to be critical for growth and this funding round gives us unlimited flexibility to ensure that Slack’s momentum will continue to pick up steam.
David Sacks, who knows a great deal about work technologies, will be serving as an advisor to Slack, and he said this:
Stewart and his team have done an amazing job designing this product, hitting the right balance between power and simplicity. The rates of growth, engagement and retention are unprecedented.
Maybe they’ll hire some marketing and sales people, since they have none at present. Wait a minute. Maybe they shouldn’t, at that.
Update 10:08pm ET 31 October 2014 — M.G. Siegler recounts how he learned about Slack and why Google Ventures is in.
