E-commerce and cloud computing firm Amazon has expressed interest in acquiring Slack, the US-based instant messaging platform backed by internet technology group Alphabet and mass media company Comcast, Bloomberg reported yesterday.
A prospective purchase would value Slack at least $9bn, people with knowledge of the situation told Bloomberg, well over twice the $3.8bn post-money valuation at which the company last raised funding in April 2016.
Slack was founded in 2009 as a game developer called Tiny Speck but pivoted in 2013 to concentrate on its workplace messaging technology. Its platform has 5 million daily active users, of which 1.5 million are paid subscribers.
The company runs a corporate venturing fund, is soon putting on a dedicated conference, and released a large-scale enterprise version of its platform in January 2016.
An acquisition would follow $540m in funding, including $200m in the 2016 series F round, which featured Alphabet unit GV, Comcast subsidiary Comcast Ventures, Accel, Index Ventures and Social Capital.
GV co-led Slack’s $120m series C round, which valued it at $1.1bn, with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2014 before returning for a $160m series E round the following year alongside Index, Horizons Ventures, DST Global, Spark Capital Growth and IVP at a $2.8bn valuation.
– Image courtesy of Slack