Slack gets slice of SoftBank’s $100bn tech bounty

Bloomberg

Slack Technologies Inc. closed a $250 million funding round led by SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund, giving it more ammunition for expansion in an increasingly competitive market for workplace messaging services. The financing round values the startup at $5.1 billion, up from $3.8 billion the last time.
The Vision Fund is joined by Accel and other investors, Slack said. Bloomberg reported on the latest funding in July.
San Francisco-based Slack said the money is for “operational flexibility,” not for a particular use, and added that it still has much of the $591 million it already raised.
The company this month announced an expansion of its service to work in German, French, Spanish and Japanese as it competes with Microsoft Corp.’s Teams and Atlassian Corp.’s HipChat service for corporate customers.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund raised almost $100 billion this year and is blanketing the venture capital market and tech sector with the money. It invested $4.4 billion in shared-office company WeWork Cos. in August, and is mulling an
investment in Uber Technologies Inc. of up to $12 billion with three other investors, Bloomberg has reported.
Last month, the Vision Fund was said to invest about $2.5 billion in Flipkart Group, the biggest Indian e-commerce operator. That deal was the largest venture deal in India, people familiar with the matter said at the time. Slack has more than 9 million weekly active users and 6 million daily active users. The company has more than 2 million people paying to use the service on more than 50,000 paid teams and revenue from subscriptions has reached $200 million.