Following the completion of a Series H round of financing, Slack is now worth a huge $7.1bn, the company has revealed.
The communications platform has seen a pretty epic level of growth in the last four years and this latest round of financing from Dragoneer Investment Group and General Atlantic demonstrates just how serious the tech industry views it.
Slack now has more than eight million Daily Active Users (DAUs) and more than 70,000 paid teams, although Slack still thinks there's work to keep accelerating that growth.
"The way people work is changing, and we are committed to delivering the best product and experience for our customers in this new era," the company said in a statement. "We pursued this additional investment to give us even more resources and flexibility to better serve our customers, evolve our business, and take advantage of the massive opportunity in front of us."
Some of Slack's business users include Marks & Spencer, ITV and Sky, with 63% of the FTSE 100 apparently using it to boost their internal communication.
"Slack has made strong progress in a very short time in this new era of enterprise collaboration," Alan Tu, Equity Research Analyst, T. Rowe Price Associates said. "Our investment represents our belief in the company's vision and leadership team, together with the product's potential to increase productivity and change the way people work on an even larger scale."
Slack isn't just an instant messaging tool. It also integrates with the majority of cloud storage services, code repositories and business software platforms to completely leverage a business's operation. In fact, businesses can even build their own apps using the Slack API to make it completely bespoke for the organisation's needs.
Although when it first launched, the majority of business users were using its free platform, Slack has successfully managed to convert these to paying customers - no mean feat in the freemium software marketplace.
