Amazon and others sniffing around Slack

Enjoying a free version of the biz collab software? Maybe not for much longer...

Slack is attracting interest from potential suitors including Amazon that are reportedly eyeing up the white collar messaging and collaboration software slinger.

The cost of such a buy could be as high as $9bn, loquacious sources told Bloomberg today, though talks are at the preliminary stage and there are no assurances an offer will be made.

The cloud-based tools and services start-up raised $200m in its last funding drive in 2016, which valued the company at $3.8bn.

Slack, founded in 2013 by Stewart Butterfield, provides corporate chat rooms for businesses and direct messaging for free, limited to 10,000 of the users’ most recent messages. If Jeff Bezos' empire buys the business, the freebie version might not last for long.

The enterprise version, released in January, includes uptime guarantees, unlimited searchable messaging and SSO and compliance exports.

The tech integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft, though Microsoft launched its Slack-killer, called Teams, in November. Redmond's chat app sits on top of Office 365 Business and Enterprise editions.

Slack, which has five million daily active users (including 1.5 million paying users), is an abbreviation of Searchable Log of ALL Conversation and Knowledge. We’ll stick with the less wordy version.

Project management online tool Trello was gobbled by devops biz Atlassian for $425m in January.

Amazon refused to comment and Slack was not immediately contactable for comment. ®