Slack ‘Alternative’ Mattermost Raises $50M

Mattermost recently announced a $50 million Series B funding round led by Y Combinator Continuity Fund. According to a company statement, new investor Battery Ventures, along with existing investors Redpoint and S28 Capital also participated in the round.

“This is Y Combinator’s largest-ever Series B investment, and the biggest open source investment to date,” Mattermost VP of Marketing, Matt Stodolnic shared with UC Today.

Stodolnic said they will use the money to speed up community expansion and product development, as well as invest in enabling key technology integrations.

Big funds mean even bigger plans

To date, Mattermost has raised $73.5 million in funds, which it plans to use to accelerate its open source and enterprise product roadmaps. Stodolnic said the company will use a part of the capital to speed the development of feature requests from the community via public feature proposal forums.

“We plan to increase the speed in which we deliver on security, compliance, and user experience upgrades to meet the enterprise needs of Forbes’ list of Global 2000 companies”

Stodolnic told me, Mattermost will finance upgrades to its EMM/MDM framework, more opinionated eDiscovery data exports, orchestrated high availability deployments, custom single-sign-on, custom permissions schemes, bespoke data migration, and tackle UX optimizations.

The hope is to further expand community and developer relations teams to make more of the hundreds of ideas and tens of thousands of upvotes that have defined the roadmap for Mattermost’s open source work thus far.

Is Mattermost real competition for Slack?

In simple terms, the answer is yes. Mattermost is already making strides toward dominating Europe, aspiring to be the continent’s primary medium for workplace collaboration and communications.

For enterprises concerned about compliance, Stodolnic shared, Europe houses Mattermost’s largest user base and the solution is, therefore, GDPR compliant. The SaaS offering further provides scalability, UI and UX customization (unlike Slack), along with access to advanced controls and private Cloud deployment to AWS.

Mattermost has many of the features Slack offers and more, including the ability to white label the solution – presenting a unique opportunity for resellers. Security is another aspect in which Mattermost presents a strong resolution to, as it is secure and enables companies to run existing and IT protocols and provides full access to the source code.

Collaboration is essential for the modern workforce

As the Digital Transformation presses on, so will the need for tools like Slack, MS Teams, and Mattermost, each of which has a distinctive place in the UC sphere, especially when it comes to collaboration.

A recent study of the global Cloud collaboration market suggests between 2019 and 2023, the market will grow by 13.2 percent. The same report by 360 Research shows the Cloud Collab market is predicted to reach $56 million by 2023.

It will, thus, remain principal for those in the Collab space to continue pushing the envelope and providing access to features that make it easier for workers to collaborate in real-time, no matter where they are.