Investments will be aimed at apps that add functionality and features to Slack and in enterprise applications that make connecting to Slack a priority.
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Slack has already invested in Small Wins, Awesome and Howdy, the company that developed Botkit, an open source framework that allows developers build Slack bots and integrations.
The fund, according to a Slack release, “is backed by Slack in partnership with Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, KPCB, Spark Growth and Social+Capital”.
As previously reported, Slack is bringing third-party apps into the fold. The idea behind Slack is to not just provide a chatroom for you and your co-workers, but to create something more along the lines of an operating system for other developers to build useful tools that you interact with through a chat interface.
“The bid to change the future of work is the goal”, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told BuzzFeed News in an interview this week.
The company has introduced Slack App Directory, where there are already more than 160 apps. For example, Salesforce launched its AppExchange marketplace in 2005, offering a clearing house of Salesforce tools and integrations and popularizing the idea of creating custom app stores. The apps in the directory can extent the capabilities of your team on the platform.
The chat app as operating system is an idea gaining currency in the tech industry right now, thanks in large part to the success China’s WeChat has seen as a platform for apps. Private Channels are for more sensitive discussions or material, plus users can use Direct Messages, which can exist between two or more Slack members in a similar way to other instant message services such as Google Hangouts. Bots are most of the time associated with spam and scam but the fact is that they are still perceived as an important tool for business communications and the users are willing to get updates from business accounts run by software. And much like Slack, Salesforce even invested in some of the companies that sold software through the AppExchange, such as the accounting software company FinancialForce. The EconoTimes content received through this service is the intellectual property of EconoTimes or its third party suppliers.
But the overarching goal is to continue to expand its user base, and Slack seems to be doing well on that front too. It will return the three most popular apps related to that keyword. It now has 2 million daily active users, and 570,000 paid members.
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Slack daily active users have shot up 16 percent since October when it had 1.7 million DAUs to 2 million DAUs in December.
