Slack, Amazon talking $9B deal
Buyout not a sure thing as chat marketplace heats up with competitors, sources say
NEW YORK— Corporate chat room startup Slack Technologies Inc. has received recent inquiries about a potential takeover from technology companies including Amazon.com Inc., people with knowledge of the situation said.
A deal could give San Franciscobased Slack a valuation of at least $9 billion (U.S.), the sources said.
An agreement isn’t assured and discussions may not go further, said the sources, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.
A representative for Seattle-based Amazon declined to comment. Slack also declined to comment.
Slack raised $200 million in its latest funding round in 2016, valuing it at $3.8 billion. The company, which introduced its business-chat software in 2013, has recently turned its eye to bigger users.
In January, Slack debuted an enterprise version of its chat software that allows tens of thousands of employees to collaborate across teams at major corporations such as IBM.
In a Bloomberg TV interview last month, Slack co-founder and chief executive officer Stewart Butterfield said that an initial public offering of the company “would be years away,” citing some unpredictability as the business continues to grow quickly.
In November, Microsoft unveiled its own chat platform — Teams — which works with the company’s cloud service, Office 365, to compete with Slack.
Slack has five million daily active users — 1.5 million of whom pay to use the service — and had $150 million in annual recurring revenue as of Jan. 31.
(Bloomberg Beta, the venture capital arm of Bloomberg LP, is an investor in Slack.)