5 March, 2016, USA: Recently, Slack has revealed its new voice and video messaging services and with that, it has blown a trumpet announcing a direct competition with Microsoft. Currently, Microsoft dominates this segment with its application called ‘Skype’.
This move by Slack has certainly raised few eyebrows in Mircrososft and as per the rumours hovering in the market, company was planning to acquire Slack in a US $ 8 million deal. But Microsoft’s Co-Founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella were not happy with deal and duo had some other plans to keep Skype ahead in the race. Gates is more interested in giving a really tough time to Slack by adding more features to Skype.
From the day Slack announced its new developments, its user base has been constantly increasing and currently it holds a mammoth data 2.3 million daily active users out of which 675,000 are payed one. These figures are very alarming to others who have been floating around in the market with their new ventures in messaging world.
Company said in a statement, “We understand that Qi Lu (EVP of applications and services) had envisaged a Slack acquisition for as much as US $8 billion, an interesting figure given some other news this week about the startup. Slack was valued at US $2.8 billion in its last announced funding round of $160 million in April 2015. However, we and others have heard that Slack is raising another round of between $150 million and $300 million. Our sources have pegged the valuation for the fundraise at $5 billion; others put the figure at between US $3.5 billion and US $4 billion.”
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