Slack valued at over $7 B after latest fund raise from General Atlantic and others

Slack's valuation has skyrocketed since last September when it raised $250 million from Japan's SoftBank.

Workplace collaboration platform Slack has raised $427 million in Series H funding from General Atlantic, Dragoneer Investment Group, T Rowe Price Associates, Sands Capital, and a couple of other undisclosed investors. It values the San Francisco-based startup at $7.1 billion.

Slack’s last funding came in September 2017, when it had raised $250 million from SoftBank’s Vision Fund at a valuation of $5.1 billion. Its flagship product, i.e. the real-time messaging app, counts over eight million daily active users (of which three million are paid users, as per PitchBook data) and over 70,000 teams.

Marc Stad, Founder and Managing Partner of Dragoneer, in a statement:

“Slack is an exceptional company that is revolutionising the way people collaborate, and we look forward to a long term partnership with the Slack team as they continue to grow the business.”

Until this $427-million round, Slack had raised a total of $841 million from 40-odd global investors that included the likes of Kleiner Perkins, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, Index, and more. Slack’s valuation skyrocketed since last September following the SoftBank investment.

Slack has managed to bring about a new era in cross-team collaboration with its easy-to-use product that can integrate itself with almost all other workplace software, social media apps, links, etc. “There is still enormous potential to change the way that people and organisations collaborate and work together,” Slack stated.

While Slack did not specify how it intends to spend the new dollars, it has looked to consolidate of late. In July, it announced the acquisition of HipChat, a similar workplace chat service, which it plans to shut down. HipChat users will be migrated to Slack, and both companies would be working together in future.

Slack’s success compelled enterprise tech giant Microsoft to roll out its own workplace communication software Teams in 2016. Microsoft made it readily available for its 135 million Office Cloud subscribers in a bid to outdo Slack. There is a free Teams version for new users too. Microsoft claims that Teams is used by over 200,000 organisations, compared to Slack’s 500,000.

Microsoft has even attempted to take over Slack. Amazon and Google too have expressed interest in the $7.1 billion startup, which has turned out to be the darling of investors, and is among the most-funded startups in the Valley.