NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Slack Series E round of $160m confirmed as CEO defends Unicorn status
Enterprise messaging platform provider Slack Technologies Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer has taken to defending the firms valuation after a rumor of a Series E round in March was confirmed.
The Series E round was confirmed at $160 million although the valuation is being reported at $2.8 billion, slightly higher than the $2.76 billion figure reported in March.
Existing investors Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Social + Capital Partnership participated in the round, along with new investors Digital Sky Technologies, Horizons Ventures, Index Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, and Spark Capital Growth.
With the new round, Slack has raised $340 million to-date.
Defending Unicorn status
One of the biggest things of note in the Slack story is just how quickly it has achieved Unicorn status (a startup valuation of $1 billion;) the company only launched in February 2014 and had achieved Unicorn status by its Series D round only eight months later.
Chief Executive Officer Stuart Butterfield took to The Wall Street Journal to defend the bubble-like valuation of the company, saying that it reflected what investors were willing to pay rather than any goal he set for the company.
“You can look at the valuation as an input or an output,” Butterfield said. “In this case it’s a little bit more of an output.”
Butterfield further defended the notion that the high valuation may deter Slack from attracting top talent as the potential for equity shares to grow is hampered by the already high valuation of the company.
Butterfield said a higher valuation can also attract engineers and others who believe they are getting a piece of a substantial, growing company.
“The more savvy someone is, the more they will think about the upside in the overall percentage of the company they get,” the CEO said. “On the other hand, people are looking at, ‘what is the underlying value of the company today?’”
The other new information to come out today was updated users figures, with the company saying it has more than 750,000 people using the site daily (up from previous reported figures of 500,000,) with more than 200,000 “paid seats” (apparently there’s a free version of Slack as well.)
photo credit: DSC_0005.JPG via photopin (license)
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