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Slack has created a $ 80 million fund to support third-party enterprise chat software.

The company Slack , which developed the eponymous corporate messenger, continues to generate new ideas for the development of its ecosystem. Slack Messenger has united around 2 million daily active users, among whom 570,000 have paid accounts. In addition, the company has created a community of developers. On Monday, it became known that now it became easier to download third-party applications thanks to the new version of the Slack App Directory (app store).

But this is only the beginning. Today, the company announced the creation of its own fund of $ 80 million. This amount was kindly provided by Accel , Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures , KPCB , Spark and Social + Capital investment funds.

The fund will invest in software companies that develop plug-ins and integration applications for the main Slack platform. This will improve Slack and make it more functional and multi-faceted.
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The fund has already invested in three such companies: Howdy , Awesome and Small Wins .

Slack certainly has competitors (the same Facebook Work Chat), and they can use and borrow ideas from the instant messenger. However, they are not able to copy the ecosystem and the developer community. This is what makes the Slack project unique.

In less than two years of its existence, the corporate messenger has grown to a valuation of $ 2.8 billion. As of November 2015, the app had 1.7 million active users daily. Four months ago, their number did not exceed 1.1 million. This indicates a 55 percent increase. Every day the Slack audience increases by about 5 thousand users.

Slack was launched in February 2014 - almost a year and a half ago. In total, Slack raised $ 340 million. The company's investors were such funds as Google Ventures , Andreessen Horowitz , DST Global and Accel Partners .

Today, the service is integrated with more than 900 thousand applications. Slack supports such well-known services as GitHub , Google Drive , Trello , Twitter , Asana .

The fact that venture capitalists have allocated funds for the creation of the Slack fund, says a lot. First, it confirms that they believe in the project. Secondly, they hope to receive a refund not only from Slack itself, but also from Slack Fund portfolio projects.

Corporate instant messenger is still spreading rapidly. Slack is becoming the primary means of business communication and workflow organization for a huge number of companies. TechCrunch compares it to Facebook, which has become the primary means of personal communication.

November 20, the world's largest social network Facebook announced its entry into the market of corporate instant messengers. The company has released the Work Chat application. Work Chat has group chat functions for discussing business ideas or for short instructions from superiors, as well as the possibility of individual correspondence.

The novelty is positioned as a working tool for business people. Experts have already noted that the messenger should be in demand primarily among users of Facebook itself.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/297324/


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