Investing in the Future of Work
News from the Slack Fund
When we started the Slack Fund, we thought a great deal about what it takes to build an ecosystem — an ecosystem where a good idea can become a lasting business, and where we, together with our developers and partners, can dramatically shape the future of work for the better. To build this kind of ecosystem you need a shared mission, great developer products, a solid distribution mechanism and finally, to help apps make it in the long run, money.
Seven months have passed since we launched the Slack Fund, and in that time we have made eleven new investments. This means we have a total of fourteen Slack-funded companies building products that enable our customers and developers to do more with Slack. We have now deployed $1.97M of our own capital, and the greater venture capital community has invested over $30M in these teams.
An ecosystem like ours is shared. Our impact as a platform is inherently and inevitably tied to the success of our partners and developers. As just one example, Growbot has over 4,800 teams celebrating achievements and improving culture with their bot. Companies funded by Slack represent only a tiny slice of the broader Slack platform — there are now over 600 apps in our App Directory, 200 added in the last two months, and 90% of paid teams on Slack actively use apps.
These are all very promising signs, and they bolster our belief that this is our collective moment to shape the way that millions of people do their jobs. This is why we have the Slack Fund: to help teams join us in building the future of work. New additions to the Slack Fund range from companies expanding the ways that HR and Sales work in Slack, to developer tools that bring natural language processing to bots. We are proud to introduce you to the companies we’ve funded since December. If your team is interested in funding from Slack, you can learn more about it on the new Slack Fund website.
Abacus is intelligent expense reporting software that brings report creation and approvals right into Slack.
Automat is making it easier for anyone to build a bot that uses artificial intelligence and human expertise to enable business conversations at scale. You can sign up for Automat’s private beta today.
Birdly connects Slack and Salesforce so that anyone can access the information they need.
Butter.ai is a personal assistant that makes all of your company knowledge easily accessible. Butter is in private beta.
Candor, Inc. aims to improve working relationships through radically candid feedback. Candor’s Slack app is not yet available.
Growbot lets you encourage and commend your teammates for a job well done with a helpful bot.
Konsus gets you 24/7 access to on-demand freelancers to help you get the job done, all via Slack.
Lattice helps you establish goals, OKRs weekly check-in and continuous feedback with your Slack team.
Myra Labs helps you build amazing bots with an API that provides machine learning modules out of the box. Myra is in private beta.
Sudo is a bot that manages your CRM, taking all of the pain of manual data entry away from the sales rep. Sudo is in private beta.
Wade and Wendy are two intelligent recruiting assistants. Wade is a career advocate who helps find you opportunities and Wendy helps recruiting teams to source candidates. Wade and Wendy aren’t live yet but you can sign up for their waitlist.
Previously funded
Awesome.ai helps teams stay in sync, find clarity and reflect on what’s important.
Begin is a bot that helps improve your focus and efficiency, keeping you on top of all of your work.
Howdy is a friendly, trainable bot that powers teams by automating common tasks.
