Slack Announces $80 Mln Investment Fund To Support Developers

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 funding is backed by Slack and its investors including Accel, Andreessen-Horowitz, Index Ventures, KPCB, Spark, and Social+Capital. The Slack Fund will fund both “Slack-first” apps as well as B2B and enterprise tools that make Slack integrations a core part of their offering, the company said.

The company also announced Slack App Directory, where users will be able to find more than 160 apps, sorted into curated lists by category, popularity, and staff favorites. There are listings from a variety of categories such as design, marketing, office management, developer tools, and productivity.

Moreover, a new framework for Slack development called Botkit has also been announced. It will help in simplifying the creation of apps (especially bots) with a flexible codebase that handles things like authenticating apps to a team and the sending, receiving, and processing of messages with its API.

“The App Directory will become the place to find apps that let your team work smarter and faster in Slack. The Slack Fund will ensure a wide range of new apps from a variety of developers will get built and launched thanks to this new financial backing. Botkit will greatly simplify Slack programming and give us a world where a thousand bots can bloom”, the online post said.

According to the New York Times, Slack offers a free service, but generates earnings by charging businesses a per-user fee for a version of the program that offers additional features. It now has over 2 million users including 570,000 paid users. Slack has invested in three companies that includes Small Wins, Awesome and Howdy.