Type of business Startup Available in Multilingual Products Slack Founded 2009 | Type of site Collaborative software Area served Worldwide Headquarters Vancouver, Canada Video game Glitch | |
Industry Internet
(formerly video game) CEO Stewart Butterfield (Mar 2009–) Founders Stewart Butterfield, Cal Henderson Profiles | ||
so yeah we tried slack
Slack Technologies, Inc. (originally Tiny Speck) is a Canadian software company founded in 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The core team is largely drawn from the founders of Ludicorp, the company that created Flickr. Slack is the fastest company to receive a billion dollar valuation. Outside its headquarters in San Francisco, California, Slack operates offices in Dublin, Vancouver and Toronto.
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Initial funding and Glitch
Tiny Speck received angel funding of $1.5 million in 2009, followed by Series A funding of $5 million in 2010 from Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. A Series B round of $10.7 million was raised in 2011.
Tiny Speck's first product was a computer game called Glitch – a social MMORPG with highly stylized 2D graphics, in which "players must learn how to find and grow resources, identify and build community and, at the higher levels of the game, proselytize to those around them". Originally scheduled for release in Spring 2011, Glitch launched on September 27, 2011, but subsequently "unlaunched" to improve gameplay. In November, 2012, it was announced that Glitch would be closed, effective December 9, 2012.
Slack and further funding
After the closure of Glitch, the company launched the Slack real-time collaboration app and platform, raising $17 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners and The Social+Capital Partnership. After the launch of Slack, the company renamed itself to Slack Technologies.
The company raised $42.75 million in April 2014. In October 2014, the company raised $120 million in venture capital with a $1.2 billion valuation led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures. In March 2015, Slack signed a deal with investors to raise up to $160 million in a funding round that valued the company at $2.76 billion. New investors include Institutional Venture Partners, Horizons Ventures, Index Ventures and DST Global. In April 2015, the company raised another $160 million.
In 2016, Slack was ranked #1 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.