Slack is ready for its next act: global domination
Slack is ready to take on the world.
Once a darling among Silicon Valley startups, the workplace chat app is now working with almost half of the Fortune 100 companies. Now, it's launching with global domination in mind.
Slack announced on Tuesday that it is now available in French, German, and Spanish with Japanese coming soon. As of Tuesday, "the entire product is localized, from the copy you see in the [interface] all the way down to the very last emoji," Slack wrote in the blog post announcement. Slack's help center and billing is also updated for these markets.
The so-called "email killer" is also doubling down on going after your inbox. Slack users can now invite outside organizations to work in new shared channels. These channels connect two separate groups and allow both users to post messages, upload files, use voice and video calling, send direct messages, and take advantage of Slack's other features.
The news comes on the heels of Slack's first-ever business conference Frontier. Founded by Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield in 2009, Slack is growing itself as a workplace brand, as it competes for customers with Facebook Workplace and Atlassian's new Stride product.
So far, Slack has 9 million weekly active users and 6 million daily active users. According to Slack, 55 percent of those users are outside of the U.S. and from more than 100 countries.
Atlassian touts 89,000 companies using its products. Facebook reported in April 14,000 organizations using Workplace, which it launched out of beta just under a year ago.
Slack, a freemium product, is growing in revenue. It more than doubled its recurring revenue from subscriptions compared to the year prior, reaching $200 million. Slack now has 50,000 paid teams and 2 million paid users.
Still, Slack is one of the most well-funded companies. The company has raised nearly $540 million. In April 2016, it closed on a $200 million Series F round.
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
