Slack, a 2-year-old messaging platform, is raising $200 million at nearly a $4 billion valuation led by Thrive Capital
The deal is expected to close in just a few weeks, but many of the details are already worked out.
Sources with knowledge of the deal told Business Insider where things stand:
- Slack is raising $200 million.
- The round will value the company at $3.7 billion to $3.8 billion (pre-money).
- Thrive Capital, a New York-based fund run by Harvard graduate and Oscar Healthcare founder Joshua Kushner, is leading the round. There is also tons of insider support from previous Slack investors.
It was a competitive round that was fairly free of drama, we were told.
Keep in mind that, until the round is officially done, things are subject to change. But those details are not expected to change very much.
Slack is a popular communication and chat program for businesses. It allows groups to send one another private messages or participate in group channels. It has a nice subscription revenue model humming along too. Of its 2.3 million daily active users, nearly 700,000 pay Slack for more services and features on the platform, which comes out to about $64 million in annual recurring revenue. And it launched just about two years ago.
Slack hopes to one day replace email as the main form of electronic communication for businesses.
Thrive has previously made early-stage investments in startups, but the firm is beginning to compete with bigger, older firms in California on larger and larger deal sizes. Thrive previously invested in Instagram, just before it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. Thrive has also backed the payment company Stripe and the code-sharing site GitHub.
The Information first reported that Thrive could be involved with the $200 million to $250 million round, and the $3.6 billion valuation on Tuesday followed a Wall Street Journal report that the work-chat application was raising another big round.
Slack raised $160 million nearly a year ago at a $2.8 billion valuation. Microsoft reportedly thought about buying it for $8 billion but decided, "nah."
This round will put its amount raised to date at over $500 million.
Stewart Butterfield, CEO and founder of Slack, previously cofounded the popular photo site Flickr. When reached for comment about the latest round of funding, a Slack representative told Business Insider: "There has always been a great deal of investor interest in the company, and we expect that to continue. However, we have nothing to announce and nothing else to add at this point."