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Slack is also facing ever-stronger competition from Microsoft Teams. Although Slack and Zoom were the same size a year ago, Zoom is expecting to have grown 280% this year, dwarfing Slack’s 38% guidance. Slack has also seen its number of large-ticket customers (with over $100,000 in trailing 12-month revenue) double since 2019.ĭespite this, Slack has disappointed investors who were hoping for Zoom-like revenue growth in response to the pandemic. It has seen a significant boost in 2020 in terms of adoption of the Slack application, with paid customers up 20,000 in the past six months, compared with an increase of 15,000 in the whole of 2019. Slack’s revenue growth has been starting to slow over the past 18 months, with its fiscal 2021 (which ends January 31) expected to show about 38% growth, versus 82% in fiscal 2019.

Microsoft decided to build its own competing solution, and Slack continued to grow at an astonishing pace. However, the deal never came to anything. There have been rumors about tech companies wanting to acquire Slack for several years - arch-rival Microsoft was reportedly considering a purchase back in 2016 - for a much lower price, needless to say. Alongside Slack’s extensive list of customers, each of these areas provide differentiation and growth opportunity that could underpin a potential acquisition. Finally, Slack Connect enables B2B collaboration and is gearing up to allow the creation of a B2B business network, which would be another great opportunity for Salesforce. And, much like Salesforce, Slack has been investing in low-code technology with its Workflow Builder tool, which enables individual, non-technical employees to automate day-to-day tasks. It has a large developer community, and is strong in bots and app development.
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Plus Slack has made investments in areas that would be interesting to Salesforce.
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The Slack team also has a good understanding of how to drive adoption and business change within customers, which would augment Salesforce’s customer success organization. Although Slack was initially successful in tech-savvy IT teams, usage has spread significantly over the last couple of years - something that has accelerated dramatically with the increase in remote working due to the pandemic.


Salesforce’s $750 million acquisition of real-time document creation company Quip in 2016 was another step in this direction, but although the product has found a strong purpose in enabling work in the CRM environment, Quip hasn’t significantly expanded Salesforce’s reach.Īcquiring Slack, however, would finally give Salesforce the boost it’s been looking for. It launched Salesforce Chatter in 2010, followed a couple of years later by Community Cloud, but neither really provided that extended reach outside sales.
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And it has long been eyeing the collaboration software space as a way to achieve this. The company wants its applications to be critical to every employee with an organization to be the place they go to get their work done. Despite these growth efforts, the bulk of Salesforce’s current applications portfolio doesn’t give it significant reach beyond sales and marketing teams. Salesforce’s most recent acquisitions, MuleSoft and Tableau, were both designed to build out the Salesforce platform, enabling it not just to become embedded in CRM processes but to extend across customers’ entire operations. However, acquisitions have played a significant role here too. Some of this has been happening organically, for example improving its cross-selling and upselling within each customer. To maintain the high rate of growth that it has achieved for the last few years, Salesforce has been investing in various initiatives that enable it to expand its reach in customer organizations. It wouldn’t be its first of this scale - Salesforce acquired Tableau in 2019 for over $15 billion in an all-stock deal - but there would need to be a rock-solid argument for such a decision. There’s no doubt this would be a major acquisition for Salesforce.
