Slack, the US-based enterprise messaging technology provider that counts corporates SoftBank, Comcast and Alphabet as investors, agreed today to raise $427m in series H funding at a valuation of more than $7.1bn.
Investment group Dragoneer and growth equity firm General Atlantic are co-leading the round, which includes Baillie Gifford, Sands Capital, funds advised by Wellington Management, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price, and unnamed existing backers.
Founded in 2009, initially as a game developer, Slack has built a freemium workplace communication and collaboration platform with 8 million daily active users including 70,000 teams that have paid subscriptions.
The round boosted the company’s overall funding to approximately $1.27bn, $250m of which came at a $5.1bn post-money valuation in a September 2017 round featuring telecommunications and internet group SoftBank and venture capital firm Accel.
GV and Comcast Ventures, respective subsidiaries of internet and technology group Alphabet and mass media company Comcast, had joined Accel and fellow VC firms Index Ventures and Social Capital for Slack’s $200m series F round in 2016, which valued it at $3.8bn post-money.
Slack had secured $160m in a series E round that included GV, Accel, Social Capital, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Andreessen Horowitz Horizons Ventures, DST Global, Spark Capital Growth and Institutional Venture Partners the year before.
The series E round, which valued Slack at $2.8bn, was preceded by a $120m series D in 2014 that was co-led by GV and KPCB and backed by existing investors Accel, Social Capital and Andreessen Horowitz at a $1.12bn valuation.
Slack said in a statement today: “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.”