SoftBank left the UC market in awe recently when it announced that it would be investing $100 billion in “visionary” technologies and digital transformation strategies for the future of the tech world. Recently, one of the world’s favourite collaboration software providers, Slack, announced that it had closed a funding round of $250 million, thanks to SoftBank’s “Vision Fund“. This should mean that the group has more opportunity than ever to expand its features in an increasingly competitive tech market.
Following the financing round, Slack is now valued at around $5.1 billion, compared to only $3.8 billion the last time they were looking for investment. The Vision Fund was also accompanied by other investors like Accel, according to Slack, but more than half of the new funding came directly from SoftBank.
The Plan for the New Money
With so much new cash to play with, it’s hard not to speculate on what the new round of funding might be used for. According to spokespeople for Slack, the money doesn’t have a specific use. Instead, it’s set aside for “operational flexibility“. The team even say that they still have a significant amount of the $591 million they had already raised, available.
According to the Chief Executive Officer of Slack, Stewart Butterfield, the additional capital provided by SoftBank and other investors should help to give the brand network, including existing and future clients, the confidence that comes with knowing that Slack is here to stay.
Butterfield said that Slack currently have several large customers in their network, and the larger ones are particularly conservative. The more these huge enterprises move thousands of people onto the Slack platform, the more important it is for the brand to prove that they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
What’s more, the money also helps to bring potential recruits along to the network, as Slack continues to compete with huge providers like Google and Facebook.
Slack Continues to Grow
Despite the obvious competition in the collaboration space, Slack has seen a lot of positive growth recently. They only just announced an expansion to the UC service that would allow the platform to work in French, German, Japanese and Spanish.
After the SoftBank Vision Fund raised around $100 billion this year, the organisation has been distributing the money happily around the venture capital market, investing $4.4 billion into “WeWork Cos.” The shared-office company, and considering an investment of up to $12 billion in Uber Technologies Inc.
With more than 9 million active users per week and 6 million active users per day, it makes sense that Slack would be a great option for investment. The company already has over 2 million people using the paid service distributed across around 50,000 teams. On top of that, the latest quarterly reports suggest that revenues received from subscriptions have amounted to around $200 million.
