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Salesforce has agreed to buy Slack for $27.7 billion in cash and stock, marking the business software powerhouse’s largest acquisition yet and adding a major new piece to its suite of offerings.
The deal represents a 55% premium to the price of Slack’s shares at the close of trading Nov. 24, the final day before reports of the deal surfaced.
Salesforce said it plans to integrate Slack’s messaging tools into its existing customer relationship management platform, with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield continuing to lead the business. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described the combination as “a match made in heaven.”
The two companies, both based in San Francisco, operate corporate venture arms that have previously co-invested together on several venture deals, including two notable funding rounds earlier this year, according to PitchBook data.
In June, both took part in a $40 million Series A for virtual events startup Hopin, valuing the British company at £228 million (about $306 million), according to PitchBook data. Last month, Hopin raised a new round of funding at a valuation of over $2.1 billion. And in August, Salesforce Ventures and Slack Fund participated in a $25 million Series B round for Crossbeam, valuing the customer networking startup at $120 million.
The sale to Salesforce comes less than 18 months after Slack went public in a direct listing on the NYSE, a public debut that valued the company at about $23 billion. Slack had previously raised more than $1 billion in venture capital, reaching a peak private valuation of just over $7.1 billion in 2018, according to PitchBook data.
Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date came last year, when it paid $15.7 billion to acquire Tableau Software.
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