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by Aware
Everything you need to know about Slack in 2023 and beyond
Slack is an essential part of modern work life for many companies around the globe. The enterprise collaboration tool helps break down silos between teams and departments, unite colleagues across time zones, and cut through red tape to help people work faster and more effectively. But how big is Slack? What is Slack worth? And how many users does Slack really have? Find out now!
Slack statistics at a glance
- Slack release date: August 14, 2013
- Slack total users: 12 million (2019)
- Percent of the Fortune 100 using Slack: 77%
- Slack company value: $27.7 billion (2021)
- Slack total revenue: $902.6 million (2021)
- Slack HQ location: San Francisco, California
Source: Slack, Business of Apps, New York Times
Where did Slack come from?
Despite being a $27 billion company today, Slack almost never existed. The messaging software was designed as in internal tool for the gaming company Tiny Speck during the development of Glitch, an MMORPG game. Glitch was short-lived — it launched September 27, 2011, and closed on December 9, 2012 — but the messaging software, then named Linefeed, lived on. Realizing its potential as an independent collaboration tool, Tiny Speck rebranded Linefeed as Slack and launched the software in August 2013.
The name Slack is an acronym. It stands for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge."
Source: Wikipedia
Slack development timeline
- 2009: Tiny Speck founded in Vancouver, British Columbia, by Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson
- 2011: Tiny Speck releases the online game Glitch, developed with the help of collaboration tool Linefeed
- 2012: Glitch closes down
- 2013: Linefeed is renamed Slack and launched to the public
- 2014: Tiny Speck rebrands as Slack Technologies LLC
Source: Wikipedia
Slack funding timeline
Since launching as Tiny Speck in 2009, Slack has received $1.4 billion in venture capital and other investments. Slack went public in 2019. In 2021, Slack was acquired by Salesforce for $27 billion.
|
YEAR |
FUNDING |
SERIES |
LED BY |
PRE-MONEY VALUATION |
|
2009 |
$1.5 million |
Angel |
|
|
|
2010 |
$5 million |
Series A |
Accel and Andreessen Horowitz |
|
|
2011 |
$10.7 million |
Series B |
Accel and Andreessen Horowitz |
|
|
2014 (April) |
$42.8 million |
Series C |
Social Capital |
|
|
2014 (October) |
$110.8 million |
Series D |
Kleiner Perkins and GV |
$912 million |
|
2015 |
$172.7 million |
Series E |
Social Capital |
$2.6 billion |
|
2016 |
$208 million |
Series F |
Thrive Capital |
$3.6 billion |
|
2017 |
$412.7 million |
Series G |
Softbank Vision Fund |
$4.7 billion |
|
2018 |
$427 million |
Series H |
General Atlantic and Dragoneer Investment Group |
$6.7 billion |
Source: Crunchbase
Slack goes public
Slack went public via direct listing process (DLP) on June 20, 2019. The share reference price at the start of trading was $26. Within hours, it had risen to over $41. Slack was delisted in June 2021 after being acquired by Salesforce. At the time, the company had a market cap of $26.52 billion. Shareholders were compensated with Salesforce stock.
- Slack ticker: WORK
- Slack highest share price: $45.64
- Slack lowest share price: $15.10
Source: Investing.com, Companies Market Cap
Salesforce acquires Slack
The acquisition of Slack by Salesforce was first reported in the Wall Street Journal in November 2020. The formal announcement of the purchase was made on December 1, 2020, for a final price of $27.7 billion.
Source: The Verge
Slack user growth
- In its first 24 hours, Slack signed up 8000 users.
- By February 2015, Slack was attracting 10,000 new daily active users each week and had more than 135,000 paying customers.
- In April 2015, Slack announced it had 750,000 daily active users and 200,000 paid subscribers.
- By the end of 2015, Slack reached its first million daily active users.
- In May 2018, Slack revealed it had over 8 million daily active users and 3 million paid subscribers.
- By 2019, that had risen to 12 million daily active users.
Source: Business of Apps
Slack Fortune 500 customers
Slack says that 77% of the Fortune 100 use its software.
Some of the biggest brands to use Slack include Amazon, PayPal, Target, Airbnb, Shopify and Pinterest.
In total, more than 750,000 organizations use Slack.
In 2020, IBM announced that it would roll out Slack to all 350,000 of its employees, making it Slack’s biggest customer to date.
Source: Stackshare, Business of Apps, Business Insider
Slack for highly regulated industries
Out of the box, Slack is not HIPAA or FINRA compliant. However, enterprise-grade security for highly-regulated industries is available for Slack through business intelligence platforms like Aware. Aware helps to support security programs that meet industry-specific regulations and requirements when it comes to data retention, search and eDiscovery, and regulatory compliance.
In 2022, Slack announced the launch of GovSlack, a secure collaboration tool built for US government agencies and contractors. GovSlack is FedRAMP High, ITAR and DoD SRG IL4 certified. Aware is an official security and compliance vendor for GovSlack.
Source: Slack
Slack headquarters and offices
Slack headquarters is located in San Francisco, California. Slack also operates locations in:
- Denver, Colorado
- Vancouver, Canada
- Tokyo, Japan
- Melbourne, Australia
- Pune, India
Source: Slack
What operating systems does Slack run on?
Slack is available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Apple Watch.
Source: Slack
How many integrations does Slack have?
Slack says it has more than 2400 integrations available through the Slack App Directory. Top integrations include Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Zoom, Salesforce, Office 365, GitHub, Zendesk and Zapier.
Slack also integrates with hundreds of partners that provide critical functionality for businesses, such as eDiscovery and data loss prevention. Currently, Aware is the only Slack partner that is recommended for both use cases.
Source: Slack
How many messages can Slack users send and receive?
Slack users can send and receive an unlimited number of messages, however free accounts have some limitations to their visibility.
Before 2022, free account users could only see their last 10,000 Slack messages. On July 18, 2022, Slack announced its first ever pricing change, with free accounts now restricted to viewing 90 days of message history. Slack says that this change will benefit a majority of users, as most teams exchange more than 10,000 messages over a 90-day period.
By default, Slack stores all messages and uploads indefinitely for paid accounts.
As of August 2024, Slack retains messages from free plans for 1 year. If a user upgrades their account within that time, they will regain visibility of all the messages they ever sent in Slack. After a year, messages are permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.
The average Slack user sends 23 messages per day, meaning just 5,000 employees will send 30 million messages each year. Of those, 1:166 will contain sensitive information.
1 in 17 include 3+ pieces of sensitive data.
In total, Slack processes over a billion messages each week.
Source: Slack, Aware, SEC
How much file storage do Slack users get?
Like message limits, Slack file storage terms changed in July 2022. Previously, users on free accounts could only access the last 5GB of storage. Today, users on free accounts can access all files uploaded within the past 90 days.
Source: Slack
How much time do users spend in Slack?
The average Slack user spends 10 hours per day logged into the app and is active for about 90 minutes.
Source: Slack
How does Slack improve productivity?
Slack is a powerhouse workplace application. Thanks to its ability to cut through red tape and connect people across teams, departments and time zones, it can accelerate productivity in a number of ways.
- Slack reduces email by 32%
- Slack reduces meetings by 23%
- Sales teams are 5% more successful at winning leads with Slack
- Slack increases potential deals won per year by 25%
- Slack use adds 0.2% to annual revenue
- Using Slack can reduce sales cycles by 13%
- Slack increases time to market by 23%
- Engineering teams using Slack have 5% higher output
- Slack reduces new employee onboarding time by 24%
- Slack creates a 10% increase in employee satisfaction
- Marketing campaigns execute 16% faster with Slack
- Customer tickets are resolved 31% faster
Source: The Business Value of Slack
Is Slack secure for business use?
Despite Slack’s widespread adoption and popularity, concerns remain about Slack security. Slack currently encrypts data in transit and at rest, but does not offer end-to-end encryption. This can leave valuable information open to exfiltration by hackers or malicious insiders.
- The average cost of a breached record was $164 in 2022
- Each data breach costs the company an average of $4.35 million
- Breaches cost $1 million more when remote work is a factor
- It takes 277 days to find and contain a data breach
Source: IBM
Aware helps major organizations to realize the value of Slack for the enterprise while securing their Slack workspace against malicious actors and insider threats by proactively identifying and removing sensitive information before it can be exfiltrated.
As the only recommended Slack partner for eDiscovery and DLP, Aware enables granular data retention policies that use AI-infused workflows to detect and remove unsanctioned information from the Slack workspace, while retaining an immutable archive of all messages, including revisions and deletions. This provides organizations with the ability to deploy federated search and eDiscovery that delivers relevant, contextualized results and accelerate early case assessment for legal or HR investigations.
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