According to Fortune, Slack is launching an $80 million investment fund in partnership with major venture capital firms like Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins. The fund, announced in late 2015, aims to finance software projects that integrate with and complement Slack’s technology. This move comes after Slack itself raised over $320 million in funding, including a $160 million round in April 2015 that valued the company at nearly $3 billion. Since its official launch in February 2014, the platform has amassed 2 million daily active users, with many users connected for an average of 10 hours per day. The company’s new head of platform partnerships, former Twitter exec April Underwood, stated the goal is to help developers “make a bet on the Slack platform” by giving them access to capital.
Slack Isn’t an App, It’s a Platform Now
Here’s the thing: this fund is a classic platform power play. Slack is looking at its explosive growth and 150+ existing integrations—with tools like Uber, Dropbox, and Twitter—and realizing its future isn’t just about being a better chat app. It wants to be the operating system for your workday. The “command center,” as they call it. By funding early-stage companies directly, they’re essentially paying to have their ecosystem built out for them. It’s a smart way to lock in users and create switching costs. Why would a company leave Slack if all their niche tools, like a reception app such as Envoy, are wired directly into it?
The Real Battle is for the Enterprise Hub
But let’s not get carried away. Slack’s Andrew Braccia compares the platform to iOS and Android, and that’s the ambition. Yet, the competition is fierce and deeply entrenched. Microsoft is baking similar “Groups” functionality right into Office 2016. Atlassian, with its wildly successful IPO, has Jira and HipChat. These aren’t just apps; they’re suites. Slack’s viral, bottom-up adoption in teams is its superpower, but the check-writing enterprise IT department often prefers the integrated, top-down suite approach. This fund is Slack’s attempt to quickly build that suite, not by developing the features itself, but by bankrolling an army of developers to do it.
What This Means for Developers and Users
For small dev teams, this is potentially huge. Getting early funding and the coveted “Slack-ready” stamp of approval in their new App Directory could be a make-or-break advantage. It prioritizes integration development for cash-strapped startups. For users, expect a flood of new, niche bots and tools that make Slack even more indispensable. The risk? App overload and notification fatigue. When everything pings your “command center,” it can start to feel less like mission control and more like a noisy stock exchange floor. Slack’s challenge will be curating this ecosystem to ensure quality, not just quantity.
The Bottom Line
This is a decisive move from a company that knows its growth window is wide open but maybe not forever. Throwing $80 million at the problem of “not enough apps” is a bold way to accelerate platform maturity. It signals that Slack believes its core product is largely “done” and the future is all about the connections. The bet is that if they can become the central nervous system of a company’s software stack, the actual messaging part becomes almost a commodity. It’s a high-stakes strategy. Will it work? That depends on whether developers and businesses buy into the vision of one hub to rule them all, or if they continue to prefer a collection of best-in-brand tools that simply talk to each other. The workplace collaboration war just entered a new, more financial phase.
