Popular workplace collaboration tool Slack has been valued at $5.1 billion post the latest financing of $250 million led by Softbank Vision Fund. The latest funding is a part of Softbank’s newly instituted $100 billion vision fund and has lifted Slack’s total fundraising to $841 million making it one of the best-financed business software startups.
This will help Slack will reduce its dependence on outside financing and run as a cash-spawning company. Slack has also raised fundings from other popular venture firms like GGV Capital, Spark Capital and Thrive Capital. It is trying to expand its business in Japan which is already its third biggest market. It is also preparing to launch a local language of its service early next year. The funding round will assist Slack in overtaking its competitor Microsoft’s service Teams. Teams recently introduced a feature which allowed people other than employees to join a company’s group chat.
A recent report suggested that Slack is growing at an annual rate of more than 100 percent. Last week, Slack reported that it had over $200 million in annual recurring revenue which is indeed one of the most widely used measures for cloud based software companies.
There was a recent rumor of Microsoft’s interest for potentially acquiring the company, which would have valued the company at whopping $8 million. Instead, Slack raised a mammoth financing from Thrive Capital which valued the company at 3.8 billion.
Recently, it launched a new feature that allows its users to create channels that employees from multiple organisations can join. Slack is constantly injecting more and more features to its services and attracting eminent companies.
Last month, Softbank Vision Fund invested a colossal amount of $2.5 billion in Indian E-Commerce giant Flipkart.
Slack has over 9 million weekly active users and 6 million daily active users. It has over 2 million people paying to use its service and over 50,000 paid teams. Its revenue from subscriptions has reached over $200 million.