Few pieces of corporate-oriented software have managed to build a following the way Slack has. It seems others agree too, given that the company just secured $120 million in funding through Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.
The funding round also comes with a $1.12 billion valuation. For some perspective, Slack just officially launched this past February (a beta began August of last year). Perhaps even more notable, Slack has done very little advertising – its growth has been almost entirely through word-of-mouth. This too in a field that is often known to move slow with new software.
Prominent investor Marc Andreessen perhaps sums things up nicely:
Slide from @SlackHQ update deck. I have never seen viral enterprise app takeoff like this before–all word of mouth. pic.twitter.com/oTkUDAQbXX
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 10, 2014
The company now has more than 30,000 teams actively logging in to Slack, amounting to over 268,000 users.
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There are many reasons people like Slack. It’s fast, it integrates many established services and it even lets you send cat GIFs to your coworkers easily.
That said, Slack recently had some bad press over a loophole that let users find out group names in rooms for companies they didn’t have access to.
Slack, however, said it was intended to be a feature, and could easily be remedied with a change in your privacy settings.
Still, given today’s news, it doesn’t seem that small trip up has affected its popularity. We’ll have to keep an eye out on the company to see how it plans to stay popular as it expands.
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