Slack could be the only business application that doesn't provoke regular bursts of homicidal rage from its users, and instead, on occasion, prompts real joy.
The corporate chat tool — or "essential team communication platform" — is celebrating its one-year anniversary today. Founded by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, the company said that it has more than 500,000 people using it every day and that its user count grew by 35% (at least 130,000) just in the first six weeks of the year. That count, the company said, has doubled twice in just the last six months. And all those incessant corporate chatterers sent 1.7 billion messages.
To fund this rapid growth, Slack has attracted $162 million worth of venture capital from investors like Google Ventures, Accel Partners, and Andreessen Horowotiz.
"Messaging has emerged as one of the most fundamental applications of the Internet, and its value is shifting into our work lives," Butterfield said in a statement. The company says that employees at Airbnb, Stripe, Walmart, Foursquare, Box, Braintree, and a gaggle of digital publishers (including BuzzFeed) use it.
And a lot of them are paying for it. Slack said it had $12 million in "annual recurring revenue," a widely watched metric for enterprise software companies that basically adds up monthly or quarterly subscriptions over the year. Slack said it hit $10 million in annual recurring revenue in "record time" and has 135,000 paid accounts (Slack has three tiers of service that range from free to $12.50 per user per month.)
"I've been working closely with and analyzing SaaS companies extensively for nearly seven years, and based on the data I've seen, Slack is the fastest growing B2B company to hit these milestones in 12 months," said Redpoint Ventures partner Tomasz Tunguz in the statement distributed by Slack.
