Translated material
Slack was valued at almost $16 billion. How the office program became the fastest growing business application in the world
Slack will debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. The valuation of a corporate messenger for communication within teams will be about $15.7 billion, writes The Wall Street Journal .
Details. According to the sources of the publication, trading in Slack shares will begin on Thursday. The company's valuation is set at $26 per share, but trading is expected to start above that price. Instead of an IPO, Slack opted for a direct listing . This means that the company will place its existing shares on the stock exchange without preliminary trading with the participation of institutional investors.
Direct listing is a new procedure, before Slack, among the technology companies, only the streaming service Spotify entered the exchange in this way. In fact, this is an alternative to an IPO, which can be used if the company does not want to raise money in capital. Before placement, the price at which investors are ready to buy securities is not set. Instead, the organizing bank gives only a rough estimate for the start of trading.
UPD. Slack stock trading began after 18:00 Moscow time. With a target of $26 per share, the first deal was made at a price of $38.5, which corresponds to the company's capitalization of $23.2 billion.
Story. Slack was created by Canadian entrepreneur Stuart Butterfield in 2013, although his company Tiny Speck didn't originally work on the app at all. She was developing a game called Glitch, and in the course of her work she needed a tool for internal communications - part of the team was sitting in Canada, the other in the USA. As a result, the idea of launching the Glitch game failed, but the messenger remained.
- In early 2014, Slack was launched as a new corporate messenger that brings together all the "team work" in one application.
- The platform quickly attracted the first investments - more than $42 million. By the end of the first year, their volume grew to $120 million, and the entire project was valued at more than $1 billion.
- In February 2015, Slack had 500,000 daily active users in 60,000 teams worldwide, with about 135,000 paid accounts.
- By the end of January 2019, the app already had more than 10 million active users in 600,000 organizations, of which about 88,000 were paid customers.
The main shareholders of Slack are venture capital funds Accel (23.8%), Andreessen Horowitz (13.2%), Butterfield has 8.4%.
- In the investment round, Slack received more than $250 million in 2017. At the same time, the company was valued at $5 billion.
What is the idea. Slack has become a replacement for internal email, the messenger can integrate different software while remaining a file exchanger. In addition, Slack has become the fastest growing business app in history, ahead of Xiaomi Technology and Instacart.
Who are the competitors. Slack competes with some of the biggest companies - Facebook (with Workplace) and Microsoft (Teams).
Money. Slack's revenue for the 2019 fiscal year, which ended in January, exceeded $400 million, the loss compared to the previous one decreased slightly to $138.9 million.