While Slack seeks to entice larger and larger companies with the prospect of a simpler workplace collaboration tool, the company said that it has now reached $ 8 million. 39 daily active users.
The company said that it also has 3 million paying users. A darling in Silicon Valley, Slack could at first capitalize on pent-up demand for much simpler and easier-to-use workplace communication tools. Companies like Yammer, Microsoft and others were looking to redo internal communications in a way that looked more like consumer tools in the era of Web 2.0, but Slack took an approach that did not Was initially just a communication tool. This allowed him to reach a valuation of $ 5.1 billion and promote its initial adoption by small businesses and startups.
Slack in September reported having about 6 million active users a day, 50,000 teams and 2 million paying users, and about $ 200 million in annual recurring revenue. So it's a pretty big jump in the last nine months, although the company still has to break with the perception that it's a tool that's just good for startups and small businesses. companies. The largest companies are those that tend to generate larger contracts – and additional revenues – as they seek to develop a strong business. More than half of Slack's users are located outside of the United States, indicating that they will continue to expand into new areas that may require tools like Slack, beyond national markets.
Slack has been trying to deploy additional tools to support these large companies, rather than just operating as a discussion tool that can get out of hand when companies have thousands of employees. The company has invested heavily in machine learning tools to make it easier to find answers that may already exist in some Slack channels or direct messages. Slack also deployed threads, a long-awaited feature that users often asked for, though it was not clear how this could exist in Slack's simplified interface.
There are already startups looking to land niches that the company might not necessarily fulfill too. Slite, a startup looking to build a simpler notes tool that would create a smarter internal wiki, collected $ 4.4 million last month. There is also Atlassian's Stride, which opened its doors to developers in February of this year. And Microsoft has its own competitor Slack, Teams, which continues to get pretty important updates. Slack has clearly exposed much of the pent-up demand for similar tools, and is now facing a lot of competition.
Slack launched the Slack Fund as a way to entice developers to build tools for Slack and, early last year, invested in 11 new companies. The company has been trying to create a robust ecosystem in which developers can fill niches that the company might miss, but it seeks to focus on its core products. The company says that there are now more than 1,500 applications in the Slack directory.