Messaging Startup Slack is getting big help this week. Slack has just announced this week that it has raised around $250 million in its latest Funding round.
According to TechCrunch, the San Francisco, California-based technology company has managed to secure around $250 million in the latest Series G funding round, boosting the company’s valuation as investors help drive new venture capital investments. This week’s funding round was led by Accel and the Japanese investment giant SoftBank, the same company that took a multibillion dollar holding in the popular ride-hailing app Uber.
Slack, the fast-growing Canadian startup
Founded in 2009 and based in San Francisco, California, Slack is a Canadian messaging service that provides a cloud-based set of team collaboration tools and services for the enterprise IT market. Originally founded in Vancouver, Canada, Slack now operates and maintains offices in Toronto, Canada, and Dublin in Ireland.
The company’s core product, the Slack team, allows remote workers, groups, and organizations to join and communicate through a specified invitation link sent by a team admin (owner). It offers a lot of IRC-like features and all content inside the messaging platform are searchable, including people, files, and conversations. Additionally, the messaging service also integrates with a number of third party services such as Google Drive, Heroku, DropBox, GitHub, Runscope, Zendesk, Trello, Box, Crashlytics and IBM Bluemix.
Slack has been doing well in raising more funds for its expansion and technology development. In April 2014, the company raised around $42.75 million, and in October 2014 it raised an additional $120 million in venture capital led by Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Slack has raised around $160 million, valuing the messaging service at $2.76 million.
It also added new investors on board, which include Index Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, DST Global and Horizon Ventures. And in April 2015, it raised again another $200 million.
Things are getting much better for Slack these days. Funding is coming on strong, with no sign of slowing down. This week’s latest funding round has put the messaging company at even larger valuation, a whopping $5 billion.
Slack has not made any further comment about its plans for the newly raised capital investment.
Slack working on takeover talks and mega deals
Although the latest investment has given Slack a much bigger market valuation from the last funding round valuation, it still a far cry from the massive $9 billion or more the company is expecting to get from a possible deal with tech giants.
Bloomberg reported earlier that the messaging startup was making some takeover talks with big-name tech companies, which include cloud giant Amazon. Unfortunately, the takeover talks have cooled in recent weeks.