The immensely popular productivity platform, Slack, has some great news today. The company boasted that it now has over 600 apps integrated into it. Along with this, the company’s Slack Fund arm has now invested a total of $1.97 million in 14 startups.
Slack Fund was first started last December when Slack partnered up with several top VCs to invest into promising startups as part of larger early-stage rounds. The overall capacity of Slack Fund is estimated to be $80 million. With its launch, Slack Fund initially invested in three startups– Awesome.ai, Begin and Howdy.
Today’s announcement adds 11 more companies under Slack Fund’s investment umbrella. These include Abacus, Automat, Birdly, Butter.ai, Candor, Inc., Growbot, Konsus. Lattice, Myra Labs, Sudo, and Wade and Wendy. The latest 11 are all bot-style services. Slack has reportedly funded $1.97 million in these 14 startups. Overall, the companies have raised over $30 million in total.
Evidently, the company is largely concentrating on startups that specialize in the so-called bot technology. For the uninformed, bots are algorithms that replace any human which get something done or find out information a little quicker. And with this tech becoming hotter every day, Slack seems to be, literally, putting its money on it.
Slack is currently on the rise in the market. With over 3 million daily active users, and 930,000 paid users, there are many concrete reasons why Slack is interested in these Slackbots. Hosting developers and improving its services just account for the smaller bits of the whole puzzle.
Slack also assures that its success is tied to the success of its partners. Quoting the example of Growbot, the blog post announcing the latest investments reads:
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.
