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Slack App Investment

Slack reworking framework and investing in app store and new integrations

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By Jessica Goodfellow, Media Reporter

December 16, 2015 | 2 min read

Slack has been around for a year, and its growth has been tremendous. By the end of October, Slack had 1.7 million users daily, with 300,000 paid accounts. Unsurprisingly then, yesterday it announced an $80m dollar investment to encourage app integration.

The investment is backed by Slack and six of its investors: Accel, Andreessen-Horowitz, Index Ventures, KPCB, Spark, and Social+Capital. It is designed to be a source of support to help developers and small companies get started in the app-building process. It will fund ‘Slack-first’ apps as well as B2B and enterprise tools that offer Slack integrations. The expectations of the portfolio created by the Slack Fund is to solve problems for teams globally in every industry.

Slack has also announced an app directory, where users will have access to 160 apps to increase the efficiency of a company’s Slack team. The directory will integrate popular apps in one easy-to-use platform. Among those available are Twitter, Dropbox, Trello and Google Drive.

The launch of a new framework, Botkit, is designed to simplify the creation of apps with a flexible codebase. This handles things like authenticating apps to a team and the sending, receiving and processing of messages with Slack's API. Botkit provides a simplified way for new developers to break into programming for Slack by building off the collection of tools available within the framework.

Slack App Investment

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