Slack is now worth more than Yelp, Vox Media, and Warby Parker — combined


Slack is raking in the dough.
The messaging platform said Tuesday that it raised $427 million in a new round of funding, CNBC reports, pushing it to a total of $1.26 billion in funding. The company is now worth more than $7.1 billion. Less than a year ago, it was worth $5 billion.
The new valuation pushes Slack into the upper echelons of Silicon Valley's newest tech start-ups. Since launching in 2014, the company has attracted 8 million users, with 3 million paying subscribers. The platform, often used for professional organization and collaboration, has already absorbed one of its biggest competitors and has promised to keep growing for at least a year before going public.
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That means Slack is now worth more than Vox Media ($1 billion), Yelp ($3.68 billion), and Warby Parker ($1.75 billion) combined, nearly as much as Squarespace ($1.7 billion), The New York Times ($3.9 billion), and ZocDoc ($1.8 billion) combined, and more than twice as much as Oscar Health ($3 billion).
Whether the joy of sending emojis and GIFs to coworkers is worth billions of dollars is debatable, but the company has made a strong case for itself as a replacement for workplace email. It plans to take on big competitors like Google and Microsoft next, and its 40 percent growth in just one year has executives excited about the future. "We pursued this additional investment to ... take advantage of the massive opportunity in front of us," the company said in the announcement. Read more at the Financial Times.
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Summer Meza has worked at The Week since 2018, serving as a staff writer, a news writer and currently the deputy editor. As a proud news generalist, she edits everything from political punditry and science news to personal finance advice and film reviews. Summer has previously written for Newsweek and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, covering national politics, transportation and the cannabis industry.
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