Slack opens office in Australia as it continues to expand
The messaging platform Slack has officially opened its Australian operation.
The company opened an office in Melbourne, Australia on Thursday in its first move into the Asia Pacific region.
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It has launched with 20 staff locally, and plans to grow the workforce to 70 people in the near future. The local operation will be headed up by Judy Watkins, the regional manager of customer experience for Asia Pacific.
Slack, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, is used by businesses and startups to communicate internally and considers some of the biggest global companies its clients, including NASA, Airbnb, Samsung, LinkedIn and Sales Force. Mashable also uses Slack.
The chat company was founded by Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson in 2014. Both have roots in the successful photo website, Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Butterfield was the cofounder of Flickr, while Henderson was director of engineering on the product at Yahoo.
The platform has seen huge growth during the last two years, including more than $340 million raised in investment from a range of high-profile backers including Accel, Google Ventures, Horizons Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
The platform, which can be integrated with services such as Twitter, Trello, Giphy, Google Docs and Dropbox, also claims it has 2.3 million daily active users, with 320 million minutes of active Slack use on a weekday. Companies surely hope that is more work, less GIFs.
Before Australia, Slack opened offices in New York, Vancouver, British Columbia and Dublin. Its push into Australia will place it in the home zone of one of its competitors, Hip Chat, which was created by local success story Atlassian.
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Jenni Ryall is Mashable's VP of Content Strategy. She spends her time launching cool, new things such as Mashable Deals and Mashable Reels. On the other days, she is developing strong partnerships with companies including Apple News, Flipboard, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
