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Valuation hits US$7.1b for Vancouverite Butterfield’s Slack app

Canadian CEO founded the messaging service in 2009
stewart_butterfield
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield while the company's Yaletown offices were undergoing renovation in 2014 | Photo: Dominic Schaefer

Amid all the smoky summer haze blanketing Vancouver, some light seems to be breaking through to the local tech sector.

Messaging service Slack has confirmed its latest valuation now sits at US$7.1 billion.

The company, founded by Vancouverite Stewart Butterfield in 2009, revealed the news Tuesday (August 21) when announcing a Series H equity round that raised US$427 million.

“We pursued this additional investment to give us even more resources and flexibility to better serve our customers, evolve our business, and take advantage of the massive opportunity in front of us,” the company stated in a blog post.

Dragoneer Investment Group and General Atlantic led the latest round, which included existing investors.

Slack is headquartered in San Francisco but the company has a multi-storey office in Yaletown, allowing Canadian CEO Butterfield access to a workplace in the same city he maintains a home.

Slack’s business-messaging app, which has 8 million daily active users, grew out of an internal messaging tool at Butterfield’s Vancouver-based gaming startup, Tiny Speck.

Before Tiny Speck re-launched as Slack, Butterfield was best known as one of the co-founders of Flickr, the image-hosting site Yahoo acquired for about US$25 million in 2005.

The latest raise was joined by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and funds advised by Wellington Management, and Baillie Gifford and Sands Capital, as well as existing investors.

To date, Slack has raised nearly US$1.3 billion.

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