Rumor: Slack in talks to raise capital at a valuation of $2B-plus
Slack Technologies, Inc., the company behind the enterprise messaging platform Slack, is said to be in talks with investors to raise capital at a valuation of between $2 billion and $2.6 billion. The news comes less than six months after Slack secured $120 million at a valuation of $1 billion-plus.
The valuation is pegged at $2 billion-plus by anonymous sources who spoke to Bloomberg Business, while TechCrunch reported that its sources pegged the valuation around $2.5-$2.6 billion.
According to TechCrunch’s sources, investors involved in the private talks include Coatue Management, LLC, who also backed Box, Snapchat and Lyft; and Horizons Ventures, who also backed the likes of Waze, Siri, Spotify and Facebook, among others.
Slack is purportedly also looking at replacing co-founder Stewart Butterfield as CEO, for a “more operational” CEO as the company enters its next growth phase, although Slack denied this to TechCrunch outright.
Butterfield was a co-founder of photo-sharing site Flickr and joined Yahoo Inc. in 2005 when the search company acquired Flickr. He left Yahoo! in 2009 to start Tiny Speck Inc., which developed an online game called Glitch. In 2012, Glitch was killed off and the company became Slack, which uses some of the underlying messaging technology from Glitch.
After only being around for one year, Slack announced in February that it had more than 500,000 daily users across more than 600,000 teams sending 300 million messages per month.
Given these prolific growth numbers, it’s no wonder investors are lining up to be a part of Slack.
“They’ve cracked the code in a very short period of time,” John Doerr, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last year. “Slack is growing more rapidly, with no marketing, than anyone else transforming enterprise communications.”
According to CB Insights, Slack was one of the 38 privately held technology companies to enter the billion dollar club in 2014. Should the rumored talks prove true and accurate, the company will pull ahead of the pack when its valuation more than doubles.
Since 2009, the company has raised more than $180 billion dollars over six rounds – two Seed rounds and Series A to D – from investors that include Slow Ventures, The Social+Capital Partnership, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others.
Image via slack.com
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