Enterprise software producer Salesforce agreed yesterday to buy Slack, the US-based, publicly listed communication platform developer that counts corporates SoftBank, Alphabet and Comcast as backers, for $27.7bn.
The deal will consist of $26.8bn in cash with the rest set to come in Salesforce shares. Slack floated in a direct listing in June 2019 with a $26.00 guidance price valuing it at about $13.1bn, and its shares closed at $43.84 yesterday.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund owned a 7.3% stake prior to the listing, registering 2.2 million of its 36.6 million shares for trading. It first invested in the company at a $5.1bn valuation and its subsequent stake of about 7% would be valued at just over $1.9bn in the deal.
Slack is the creator of an enterprise messaging platform with about 12 million daily active users. The increased proportion of employees working remotely in recent months has allowed it to grow that user base but it is still firmly behind Microsoft Teams in terms of user numbers.
Salesforce plans to leverage the platform as the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, its application and customer identity management tool.
The added capabilities are intended to expand Salesforce Customer 360 into a platform that enables company employees, customers and partners to communicate with each other through existing workflows.
Slack had raised a total of $1.27bn in VC funding since being founded in 2009, from backers also including GV, a subsidiary of internet technology conglomerate Alphabet, which first invested at a $1.12bn valuation in 2014, and mass media group Comcast’s investment arm, Comcast Ventures, which invested at a $3.8bn valuation two years later.
Other pre-listing investors in the company include Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, Dragoneer, General Atlantic, Baillie Gifford, Sands Capital, Index Ventures, Horizons Ventures, DST Global, Spark Capital, Kleiner Perkins, funds advised by Wellington Management and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price.
