It was only two months ago that a Reuters report emerged stating that Slack Technologies, the San Francisco software company behind the app of the same name, was in the process of raising $250 million from an all-star list of investors.
According to a new report from the Financial Times on Sunday, the rumors were true.
Slack did indeed raise $250 million from investors, according to the report, the majority coming from SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The latest round puts the company’s total funding raised to $841 million and its valuation at $5.1 billion (including cash raised).
It was previously valued at $3.8 billion.
The FT report notes that Slack continues its extraordinary growth, citing statistics from CEO Stewart Butterfield including growth of more than 100% annually and $200 million in annual recurring revenue. “If it was 10 years ago we’d be public by now,” Butterfield tells Richard Waters. (He adds that a Slack IPO will come after 2018.)
The company competes with Atlassian, maker of HipChat; Facebook; Google; and Microsoft, which earlier this year debuted a rumored “Slack-killer” called Teams.
In June, Butterfield told Coins2Day’s Michal Lev-Ram that the role of Slack—which began as a real-time chat service and now encompasses a range of features for business productivity, wrapped in a consumer-friendly interface—will continue to expand into what he calls a “virtual chief of staff” that could help with functions such as employee feedback.
“Performance reviews can be handled by bots,” he told us.
Just another day at one of the fastest-growing business software companies.