Slack sets aside $80 million to help developers extend its platform

Slack was launched a little over two years ago in August 2013 and is a team collaboration system built around keeping a team in touch and keeping this discussion readily searchable by keyword, date or user. Its collaboration service has become a staple of day-to-day work at thousands of the world’s biggest enterprises and now boasts over two million daily users, adoption that the new financing arm will aim to expand by encouraging more third party support. The fund was backed by Slack as well as investors Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, KPCB, Spark and Social+Capital. A more immediate benefit is that improving the system to allow more and more third party integration will improve how readily Slack is adopted, and this is good news for adding more customers going forwards.

Slack Technologies Inc, that facilitates teams of workers exchange online messages, recently announced an $80 million investment fund to support and encourage developers to build apps that integrate with its software, also dubbed as Slack, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The app directory includes more than 160 apps that integrate with Slack’s platform including Twitter, Google Drive, Dropbox and Trello.

From a more technical perspective, Slack’s new platform ties into a growing trend called “ChatOps,” where companies are increasingly combining every day apps with chat programs.

Successful platforms, products, and operating systems can’t exist in a vacuum.

Smaller players like Box, Zendesk, and Atlassian all have their own app marketplaces, too. And much like Slack, Salesforce even invested in some of the companies that sold software through the AppExchange, such as the accounting software company FinancialForce. See the leverage that Slack already has by offering services to developers. The EconoTimes content received through this service is the intellectual property of EconoTimes or its third party suppliers.

It will primarily make investments worth around $1,00,000 to $2,50,000 in seed stage startups that make Slack their core foundation.It will fund both “Slack-first” apps as well as B2B and enterprise tools that make Slack integrations a core part of their offering. That’s what trendy workplace chat vendor Slack is doing. Further, it has 570,000 paid users compared to 470,000 in October.

Slack will also be revealing the number of active users on its platform which seems to be pegged at 2-Million, a rather healthy number for inducing new features, tools and earning revenue. The apps in the directory are sorted according to the category, popularity and favorites.