Heading toward a public offering of some sort later this year, Slack Technologies Inc. today announced that it has passed 10 million daily active users.

The figure comes five months after the team chat service passed 8 million users and 16 months after it passed 6 million users.

Perhaps even more important, Slack has also seen a jump in paying customers, now sitting at more than 85,000, an increase of about 50 percent over the last year. Total paid users have now passed 3 million.

Slack apps, applications that allow users to connect Slack to other tools, now number more than 1,500 with notable partnerships, including Google LLC, Workday Inc., Salesforce Inc., ServiceNow Inc. and Atlassian plc.

The growth comes as the company looks to go public later this year. Long rumored to be heading down the path of a traditional initial public offering, with one report suggesting the company could float on a valuation of more than $7 billion, Slack may be taking an alternative path. A report Jan. 11 claimed that instead of pursuing an IPO, Slack was looking at a direct listing.

Whichever way its shares are made available to the public, potential investors will be considering just how much room Slack has to grow. Rival Microsoft Teams is surging ahead in the team chat market.

A survey released in December found that Microsoft Teams was now used by 21 percent of businesses versus only 15 percent using Slack. Some 41 percent of those surveyed said they plan to use Microsoft Teams by the end of 2020 versus 18 percent opting for Slack. As of September, Microsoft said that 329,000 organizations were now using Teams, up from 200,000 in March, with 87 of the top Fortune 100 companies using the service.

There’s room in the market for more than one player, but the growing dominance of Microsoft Teams will limit Slack’s growth opportunities going forward, something that will be taken into account by investors.

Photo: Scott Schiller/Flickr