Popular enterprise communication suite Slack, has announced the launch of ‘Slack Fund III’, the third iteration of its specialised fund that invests in ‘future of work’ startups. At $100 million, this fund is double the size of $50Mn Fund II and will now let Slack co-invest as well as lead certain investments that it plans to make through this new vehicle.
Talking about this fund’s investment focus, Slack mentioned in a press statement, “We’re looking at new categories and novel approaches to challenges that people have faced in all aspects of getting work done—from collaboration to mental health and wellness, coaching, hardware and beyond.”
The company has a rather rich success record with its previous two funds. Slack has invested in nearly 100 companies from the $75Mn that it committed combined in previous two funds. These companies have together raised over $5.5 Billion in follow-up capital, some of them giving decent returns to Slack. More so, a lot of these investee companies have gone on to integrate solutions within Slack, thus further broadening the scope of world’s most popular enterprise communication platform.
“We are in the very early innings of watching how hybrid and remote work changes not only how software is built and utilized but how organizations are formed and structured, and we want the Slack Fund to be at the center of helping to enable these transitions. If there’s someone thinking about starting a company that will drive the next wave of the future of work, we want to be on their radar.”, added Jason Spinell, Head of Slack Fund.
The new fund would continue to invest in early-stage as well as pre-IPO rounds, thus opening itself up to a wide basket of startups. And as it has done previously, it would co-invest in a lot of these companies, in partnership with Salesforce Ventures. Some of this fund’s notable investments include popular password manager 1Password, customer data intelligence platform Hightouch among others.
