Month: August 2018

We caught wind pretty early on that Anki’s Cozmo was selling briskly when the adorable little robot temporarily sold out around Christmas 2016. Along with the announcement of the company’s latest robot, the startup released Cozmo sales figures for the first time, and things are, indeed, looking pretty good for the Wall-E-inspired ‘bot.

Turns out the company has sold more than 1.5 million Cozmos to date. Not too shabby for a $180 robot toy that admittedly launched with somewhat limited functionality (with the promise to add more in time) Anki also says that the device was the best-selling toy in its class for the whole of 2017, which seems to officially put to rest any concern that the pricey robot was going to be too much of a niche device to warrant serious consideration. 

It also gives the company solid footing to launch a robot like the pricier Vector, even as companies like Sphero and Kuri have stumbled. Along with all of that, the company also generated just under $100 million in revenue last year. Anki currently employees 203 and has raised north of $200 million, with a Series D arriving in 2016, no doubt spurred on by some of the early attention the company go when Apple featured its Drive cars at a keynote way back in 2013.

While some of the largest technology companies in the world are racing to figure out the next generation of machine learning-focused chips that will support devices — whether that’s data centers or edge devices — there’s a whole class of startups that are racing to get there first.

That includes Cerebras Systems, one of the startups that has raised a significant amount of capital, which is looking to continue targeting next-generation machine learning operations with the hiring of Dhiraj Mallick as its Vice President of Engineering and Business Development. Prior to joining Cerebras, Mallick served as the VP of architecture and CTO of Intel’s data center group. That group generated more than $5.5 billion in the second quarter this year, up from nearly $4.4 billion in the second quarter of 2017, and has generated more than $10 billion in revenue in the first half of this year. Prior to Intel, Mallick spent time at AMD and SeaMicro.

That latter part is going to be a big part of the puzzle, as Google looks to lock in customers in its cloud platform with tools like the Tensor Processing Unit, the third generation of which was announced at Google I/O earlier this year. Data centers are able to handle some of the heavy lifting when it comes to training the models that handle machine learning processes like image recognition as they don’t necessarily have to worry about space (or partly heat, in the case of the TPU running with liquid cooling) constraints. Google is betting on that with the TPU, optimizing its hardware for its TensorFlow machine learning framework and trying to build a whole developer ecosystem that it can lock into its hardware with that and its new edge-focused TPU for inference.

Cerebras Systems is one of a class of startups that want to figure out what the next generation of machine hardware looks like, and most of them have raised tens of millions of dollars. It’s one of the startups that has been working on its technology for a considerable amount of time. Others include Mythic, SambaNova, Graphcore, and more than a dozen others that are all looking at different pieces of the machine learning ecosystem. But the end goal for all of them is to capture part of the machine learning process — whether that’s inference on the device or training in a server somewhere — and optimize a piece of hardware for just that.

And while Google looks to lock in developers into its TensorFlow ecosystem with the TPU, that there are a number of different frameworks for machine learning may actually open the door for some startups like the ones mentioned above. There are frameworks like PyTorch and Caffe2, and having a kind of third-party piece of equipment that works across a number of different developer frameworks may end up being attractive to some companies. Nvidia has been one of the largest beneficiaries here of the emergence of GPUs as a go-to piece of hardware for machine learning, but these startups all bet on room for a new piece of hardware that’s even better at those specialized operations.

Fast-growing Chinese media startup ByteDance is looking to raise as much as $3 billion to continue growth for its empire of mobile-based entertainment apps, which include news aggregator Toutiao and video platform Tiktok.

The Beijing-based startup is in early-stage talks with investors to raise $2.5 billion to $3 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the plans. That investment round could value ByteDance as high as $75 billion, although the source stressed that the valuation is a target and it might not be reached.

It’s audacious, but if that lofty goal is reached then ByteDance would become the world’s highest-valued startup ahead of the likes of Didi Chuxing ($56 billion) and Uber ($62 billion). Only Ant Financial has raised at a higher valuation, but the company is an affiliate of Alibaba and therefore not your average ‘startup.’

The Wall Street Journal first broke news of the ByteDance investment plan.

But there’s more: Earlier this week, the Financial Times cited sources who indicate that ByteDance is keen to go public in Hong Kong with an IPO slated to happen next year.

ByteDance is best-known for Toutiao, its news aggregator app that claims 120 million daily users, while it also operates a short-video platform called Douyin. The latter is known as TikTok overseas and it counts 500 million active users. TikTok recently merged with Musical.ly, the app that’s popular in the U.S. and was acquired by ByteDance for $1 billion, in an effort aimed at combining both userbases to create an app with global popularity.

The firm also operates international versions of Toutiao, including TopBuzz and NewsRepublic while it is an investor in streaming app Live.me.

The company’s growth has been mercurial but it has also come with problems as the company entered China’s tech spotlight and became a truly mainstream service in China.

ByteDance had its knuckles wrapped by authorities at the beginning of the year after it was deemed to have inadequately policed content on its platform. Then in April, its ‘Neihan Duanzi’ joke app was shuttered following a government order while Toutiao was temporarily removed from app stores. It returns days later after the company had grown its content team to 10,000 staff and admitted that some content it had hosted “did not accord with core socialist values and was not a good guide for public opinion.”

Analysis of open source information carried out by the investigative website Bellingcat suggests drones that had been repurposed as flying bombs were indeed used in an attack on the president of Venezuela at the weekend.

The Venezuelan government claimed three days ago that an attempt had been made to assassination president Maduro using two drones loaded with explosives. The president had been giving a speech at the time which was being broadcast live on television when the incident occurred.

Initial video from a state-owned television network showed the reaction of Maduro, those around him and a parade of soldiers at the event to what appeared to be two blasts somewhere off camera. But the footage did not include shots of any drones or explosions.

News organization AP also reported that firefighters at scene had shed doubt on the drone attack claim — suggesting there had instead been a gas explosion in a nearby flat.

Since then more footage has emerged, including videos purporting to show a drone exploding and a drone tumbling alongside a building.

Bellingcat has carried out an analysis of publicly available information related to the attack, including syncing timings of the state broadcast of Maduro’s speech, and using frame-by-frame analysis combined with photos and satellite imagery of Caracus to try to pinpoint locations of additional footage that has emerged to determine whether the drone attack claim stands up.

The Venezuelan government has claimed the drones used were DJI Matrice 600s, each carrying approximately 1kg of C4 plastic explosive and, when detonated, capable of causing damage at a radius of around 50 meters.

DJI Matrice 600 drones are a commercial model, normally used for industrial work — with a U.S. price tag of around $5,000 apiece, suggesting the attack could have cost little over $10k to carry out — with 1kg of plastic explosive available commercially (for demolition purposes) at a cost of around $30.

Bellingcat says its analysis supports the government’s claim that the drone model used was a DJI Matrice 600, noting that the drones involved in the event each had six rotors. It also points to a photo of drone wreckage which appears to show the distinctive silver rotor tip of the model, although it also notes the drones appear to have had their legs removed.

Venezuela’s interior minister, Nestor Reverol, also claimed the government thwarted the attack using “special techniques and [radio] signal inhibitors”, which “disoriented” the drone that detonated closest to the presidential stand — a capability Bellingcat notes the Venezuelan security services are reported to have.

The second drone was said by Reverol to have “lost control” and crashed into a nearby building.

Bellingcat says it is possible to geolocate the video of the falling drone to the same location as the fire in the apartment that firefighters had claimed was caused by a gas canister explosion. It adds that images taken of this location during the fire show a hole in the wall of the apartment in the vicinity of where the drone would have crashed.

“It is a very likely possibility that the downed drone subsequently detonated, creating the hole in the wall of this apartment, igniting a fire, and causing the sound of the second explosion which can be heard in Video 2 [of the state TV broadcast of Maduro’s speech],” it further suggests.

Here’s its conclusion:

From the open sources of information available, it appears that an attack took place using two DBIEDs while Maduro was giving a speech. Both the drones appear visually similar to DJI Matrice 600s, with at least one displaying features that are consistent with this model. These drones appear to have been loaded with explosive and flown towards the parade.

The first drone detonated somewhere above or near the parade, the most likely cause of the casualties announced by the Venezuelan government and pictured on social media. The second drone crashed and exploded approximately 14 seconds later and 400 meters away from the stage, and is the most likely cause of the fire which the Venezuelan firefighters described.

It also considers the claim of attribution by a group on social media, calling itself “Soldados de Franelas” (aka ‘T-Shirt Soldiers’ — a reference to a technique used by protestors wrapping a t-shirt around their head to cover their face and protect their identity), suggesting it’s not clear from the group’s Twitter messages that they are “unequivocally claiming responsibility for the event”, owing to use of passive language, and to a claim that the drones were shot down by government snipers — which it says “does not appear to be supported by the open source information available”.

The tech startup community across Africa is developing rapidly, and we’re beyond happy to return a second time to host TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 in Lagos, Nigeria on December 11. More than 300 tech hubs across Africa connect and mentor entrepreneurs, and we can’t wait to showcase 15 of the continent’s best innovators, makers and technical founders. Are you one of them? Want to compete in the Startup Battlefield? Submit your application today.

The format for this Battlefield differs from the one we hosted in Nairobi last year, so here’s what you need to know before you apply.

We encourage applications from any type of early-stage tech startup. The review process is competitive, and seasoned TechCrunch editors will scrutinize every application and select 15 companies to participate. They’ll base their selection on, among other things, a startup’s potential to produce an exit or IPO.

Participating founders receive free pitch coaching from our editors, and they’ll be at their very best come the big day. Five startups will compete in one of three preliminary rounds, where they’ll have six minutes to pitch and present their demo to a panel of judges composed of entrepreneurs, technologists and VCs (recruited by our editors), all experts in their categories.

Following each pitch, the judges have six minutes to ask probing questions. Five of the original 15 startups will be chosen to pitch a second time — to a fresh set of judges — and from that cohort the judges will choose one overall winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018.

The champion founders will receive US$25,000 in no-equity cash, plus an expenses-paid trip for two to compete in Startup Battlefield in San Francisco at our flagship event, TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

Perhaps even more valuable than the cold, hard cash is the exposure that comes from pitching in front of a live audience of influential technologists, entrepreneurs and investors — and to the global TechCrunch audience tuning in online. That’s pure gold.

Now that you know the process and what’s at stake; here’s what you need to know about eligibility. Startups should:

• Be early-stage companies in “launch” stage
• Be headquartered in one of our eligible countries*
• Have a fully working product/beta that’s reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts

If you want to dig deeper into the details, read our TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 FAQ.

It’s a prime time to be a startup in Africa, and it’s the perfect time to compete in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018, which takes place on December 11 in Lagos, Nigeria. Apply right here today.

*Residents in the following countries may apply:

Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Comoros, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in the foregoing language, the “Applicable Countries” does not include any country to or on which the United States has embargoed goods or imposed targeted sanctions (including, but not limited to, Sudan).

SenseTime may be best known as the world’s highest-valued AI company — having raised $620 million at a valuation of over $4.5 billion — but it is also an investor, too. The Chinese firm this week led a 1.36 billion RMB ($199 million) Series D funding round for Moviebook, a Beijing-based startup that develops technology to support online video services.

Moviebook previously raised a 500 million RMB Series C in 2017, worth around $75 million. SB China Venture Capital (SBCVC) also took part in this new round alongside Qianhai Wutong, PAC Partners, Oriental Pearl, and Lang Sheng Investment.

With the investment, SenseTime said it also inked a partnership with Moviebook which will see the two companies collaborate on a range of AI technologies, including augmented reality, with a view to increasing the use of AI in the entertainment industry.

In a statement in Chinese, SenseTime co-founder Xu Bing said the companies plan to use the vast amounts of video data from broadcasting, TV and internet streams to help unlock commercial opportunities in the future. He also stressed the potential to bring AI and new technologies to the entertainment industry.

This isn’t SenseTime’s first strategic investment, but it is likely to be its most significant to date. The company has previously backed startups that include 51VR, Helian Health and Suning Sports, the spinout from retail giant Suning.

SenseTime itself has raised over $1.6 billion from investors, which include Alibaba, Tiger Global, Qualcomm, IDG Capital, Temasek and Silver Lake Partners.

Handiscover, a startup that lets you find and book accessible travel accommodation, has raised $700,000 in new funding. The round is backed by Howzat Partners, which has previously invested in a number of successful travel companies, such as publicly-listed Trivago and more recently Lodgify. Tranquility Capital, a Swedish family fund with a background in accessibility, also participated.

Originally launched in June 2015 to enable hosts to list accommodation and have Handiscover’s algorithm classify the accessibility of their properties or rooms, the startup has since evolved into a fully fledged two-sided marketplace, enabling consumers to search for and book travel accommodation based on various accessibility needs. The idea, founder Sebastien Archambeaud tells me, was born from his own experience as the father of 13-year-old Teo (pictured) who has a muscle condition and uses a wheelchair to get around.

“When travelling as the family we got so frustrated about the lack of purposeful information about accessibility of both vacation rentals and/or rooms for hotels,” he says. “That was what planted the first seed in my mind. Having a long background in international management and some previous tech experience and knowledge about building marketplaces, I thought I was well equipped to build a project like that. But as usual it never is as easy at it first sounds”.

Easy it might not be, but Handiscover seems to be making a decent dent so far, and appears more than capable of picking up any slack left by Airbnb’s recent acquisition of lesser-sized Accomable, which it has since shuttered. Handiscover currently lists 28,000 properties and rooms, and covers 83 countries, with more to come.

“Our mission is to enable people with disabilities and special needs (15-20 percent of the population) to travel the world, by being able to find a great choice of accommodations at different price levels, adapted to our users specific needs,” explains Archambeaud. “As there is no international standard for accessibility we created our own, using an algorithm to classify accommodations according to their level of accessibility, in a consumer friendly way”.

Archambeaud says direct competitors are mostly traditional travel agencies that specialise in disability, meaning they might have a website but are mainly focused on selling full holiday packages by phone. “We are more into helping our community travel the ‘modern’ way by bringing the freedom of booking online, when you want and with a large international choice,” he says, revealing that Handiscover will soon be working with travel tech company Amadeus to scale supply in terms of the number of hotels listed.

Meanwhile, asked what he thinks of Airbnb’s acquisition of Accomable, Archambeaud had this to say: “[It] was a great signal that our community is relevant from a business point of view and that Airbnb takes an interest in it. For us it has just been positive so far, both business-wise when talking to investors, but also from a community point of view”.

Hansel, an India-based startup that enables more agile product development inside companies, has pulled in $4 million as it seeks to expand its business to the U.S..

The startup was founded in 2015 and it operates a real-time mobile app development platform that simplifies the process of product iteration inside companies. That’s to say that once a product is launched there’s a lot of work that is done to develop it, test new ideas and optimize but many companies overlook the process or lump it with the general engineering, which includes initial product development.

Hansel argues that product development and iteration are different, and its wider aim is to enable dedicated ‘product ops’ inside companies that until now never considered the process to be distinct from app development, or perhaps don’t have the budget.

“Product iteration is often neglected as people want to move to the next thing, but that means product building is only half done,” Varun Ramamurthy, CEO of Hansel, told TechCrunch in an interview. “We want to significantly accelerate product iteration and provide a platform for ‘product ops.'”

“Big firms like Facebook and Uber champion product ops teams inside their business but they have already built the infrastructure and have dedicated specialists. That allows them to move at breakneck on launched product and features, their competitive advantage is speed to market,” he added.

The Hansel ‘Lake’ platform is a single repository that decouples product development from the code itself, allowing teams to create a range of different experiences — iterations — that can be pushed out to different user segments. The company charges users based on end-user numbers, such as monthly active user bases,  but it also includes customized pricing for some premium features, too.

Ramamurthy is formerly of Zynga in the U.S. among other places, and he met his Hansel co-founders Mudit Krishna Mathur and Parminder Singh while the trio were at Flipkart, the Indian e-commerce giant.

“We got together at Flipkart and saw a huge difference in speed between Facebook, other top firms and the rest of the world,” Ramamurthy recalled. “When it comes to speed of personalization and iterations of product, the rest of the industry had a lot of catch up. We want to help separate iterations and personalization from general engineering… today it is all confused.”

The startup has focused on India to date where Ramamurthy said it has large mid-market companies and enterprises as clients, including Uber rival Ola, Paytm and Magicpin. That work has given the team of 23 people a good grounding on what to expect for clients, how to work with them and how to package its service, and now the next phase is to do more business in North America.

Hansel is using the new funding to open an office in the Bay Area, where it has recruited its first two hires to drive business development and sales. Ramamurthy himself plans to spend more time in the U.S. as part of the effort, which will also see a product marketing team hired Stateside. R&D and product development will remain anchored out of Hansel’s India office.

This new round takes Hansel to $5.4 million raised to date. Vertex led this Series A with participation from existing backers IDG Ventures India and Endiya Partners.

Amazon today is continuing to make good on its Whole Foods acquisition by introducing a new grocery pickup service at select Whole Foods locations in the U.S. The service, which is available only to Prime members, will initially be available at stores in Sacramento and Virginia Beach, but will expand to more cities through the year. Customers will be able to place their orders using Amazon’s Prime Now app or on the web via PrimeNow.com, then pick up in as little as 30 minutes, Amazon says.

Customers will be able to shop Whole Foods’ fresh and organic produce, bakery, dairy, meat and seafood, floral, and other staples, then pick up their order in an hour from their local Whole Foods Market.

This is the same selection of the thousands of items that customers can order for delivery. The majority of in-store items are available across both pickup and delivery services, we understand.

For orders over $35, the grocery pickup service is free. Under $35, the pickup fee is $1.99.

If customers want to get their order more quickly, they have the option of pay an additional $4.99 for a 30-minute pickup instead.

Once they arrive at the store, customers will park in a designated spot and a Prime Now shopper will then bring the groceries out to their car – the customer can stay in their vehicle. The Prime Now app also has a feature that lets the customer alert the store they’re on the way, so the order will be sure to be ready when they arrive.

The pickup service, like Whole Foods delivery, will be offered from 8 AM to 10 PM.

“Pickup from Whole Foods Market is a perfect option for customers who want to grab healthy and organic groceries at their convenience, all without leaving their car,” said Stephenie Landry, Worldwide Vice President of Prime Now, AmazonFresh and Amazon Restaurants, in a statement about the launch.

Amazon already offers grocery delivery from Whole Foods Market across dozens of cities, but this is the first time it has offered grocery pickup.

The move is a direct challenge to rival Walmart, which has been steadily rolling out a grocery pickup service of its own for years. Today, that service is available at 1,800 Walmart locations in the U.S., with plans to reach 2,200 by year-end, Walmart confirmed to us.

Walmart’s grocery pickup service offers shoppers the same general value proposition as Amazon’s. That is, you can shop online for your groceries, drive to the store, then have someone bring them out to you.  Walmart’s service has been especially well-received by parents with small children, who don’t like the hassle of bringing them into the store for grocery shopping, as well as by others who just don’t have a lot of time to grocery shop.

The service has made sense for Walmart’s more value-minded customers, too. With grocery pickup, shopping can be more affordable because there’s not the overhead of running a delivery service – as with Instacart and Target-owned Shipt, where it’s costlier to use the app than to shop yourself. (Plus, you have to tip).

In addition to not marking up the grocery prices, Amazon notes that Prime members can also receive the same 10 percent off sale items they would otherwise get if shopping in the store, and they’ll enjoy the deeper discounts on select items. These savings are available in-store, or when using grocery pickup or delivery.

Alongside this launch, Amazon is also adding a new way to use Alexa for voice shopping from Whole Foods.

Prime members in supported regions can add Whole Foods Market groceries to their Prime Now cart with simple voice commands. For example: “Alexa, add eggs to my Whole Foods cart.”

Alexa will pick the best available match for your request, considering users’ order history and purchasing behavior of other customers when it adds an item to the cart.

But customers will review these cart additions when they go online later to complete their order and checkout. It’s easy to swap the item in the cart for another one at that time.

A report released this week by The Information claimed that few Alexa owners were actively voice shopping using their Alexa devices, but this data seemed to overlook Alexa’s list-making capabilities. That is, people are more likely using Alexa to add items to an in-app shopping list, which they later revisit when they’re back on their phone or computer to complete the purchase. This behavior feels more natural, as shopping often requires a visual confirmation of the product being ordered and its current pricing.

It’s not surprising that people aren’t using Alexa to transact directly through the voice platform, but it is a bit far-fetched to claim that Alexa isn’t providing a lift to Amazon’s bottom line. In addition to list-making, Alexa also helps to upsell customers on Prime memberships, and its other subscription services, including Prime Music Unlimited, the number 3 music service behind Spotify and Apple Music, as well as Audible subscriptions.

Plus, Alexa controls the smart home, and Amazon has acquired smart home device makers and sells its own smart home hardware. It also offers installation services. Those sales, like music or audiobooks, also aren’t directly flowing through Alexa, but Alexa’s existence helps to boost them.

Amazon’s new Whole Foods/Alexa integration will also capitalize on the more common behavior of list-making, rather than direct check out and purchase.

Amazon declined to say which other markets would receive Whole Foods grocery pickup next, how many it expects to support by year-end, or what factors it’s considering as to where to roll out next. It would only say that it will reach more customers this year.

However, as the grocery pickup and delivery services expand, customers can find out if it’s arrived in their area by saying, “Alexa, shop Whole Foods Market.”

Slack — the app that lets coworkers and others in professional circles chat with each other and call in data from hundreds of integrated apps in the name of getting more work done (or at least procrastinating in an entertaining way) — has been on a growth tear in the last few years, most recently passing 8 million daily active users, 3 million of them paying. Now, the company is planning to capitalise on that with some more funding.

TechCrunch has learned that Slack is raising another round, this time in the region of $400 million or possibly more, with a post-money valuation of at least $7 billion — adding a whopping $2 billion on top of the company’s last valuation in September 2017, when SoftBank led a $250 million round at a $5.1 billion valuation.

We’ve heard from multiple sources that a new investor, General Atlantic, is leading this round, with possibly another new backer, Dragoneer, also in the mix. It’s not clear which other investors might be involved; the company counts no less than 41 other backers on its cap table already, according to PitchBook. (You might even say Several People Are Funding…) We also don’t know whether this round has closed.

At $400 million, this would make it Slack’s biggest round to date. That size underscores a few different things.

First, it points to the existing opportunity in enterprise messaging. Consumerisation has taken hold, and apps that let users easily start and carry on a mix of serious and diverting conversations, infused with GIFs or whatever data they might need from other applications, are vying to replace other ways that people communicate in the workplace, such as email, phone conferences and in-person chats, even when people are in the same vicinity as each other. With consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp topping 1.5 billion users, there’s plenty of room for enterprise messaging to grow.

Second, the round and valuation emphasize Slack’s position as a leader in this area. While there were other enterprise social networking apps in existence before Slack first launched in 2013 — Yammer, Hipchat and Socialcast among them — nothing had struck a chord quite as Slack did. “Things have been going crazy”, was how co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield described it to me when Slack exited beta: teams trialling it were seeing usage from “every single team member, every day.”

That growth pace has continued. Today, the company counts 70,000 paid teams including Capital One, eBay, IBM, 21st Century Fox, and 65 percent of Fortune 100 companies among its bigger users; and with customers in 100 countries, half of its DAUs are outside North America (UK, Japan, Germany, France and India are its biggest international markets).

But thirdly — and this could be key when considering how this funding will be used — Slack is not the only game in town.

Software giant Microsoft has launched Teams, and social networking behemoth Facebook has Workplace. Using their respective dominance in enterprise software and social mechanics, these two have stolen a march on picking up some key customer wins among businesses that have opted for products that are more natural fits with what their employees were already using. Microsoft reported 200,000 paying organizations earlier this year, and Facebook has snagged some very large customers like Walmart.

Slack’s bottom-up distribution strategy could give it an edge against these larger companies and their broader but more complex products. The lightweight nature of Slack’s messaging-first approach allows it more easily be inserted into a company’s office stack. Nearly every type of employee needs office messaging, creating potential for Slack to serve as an identity layer for enterprise software. It’s own Slack Fund invests in potential companies that plug in, as the company hopes to build an ecosystem of partners that can fill in missing functionality.

Alongside dozens of other, smaller rivals offering comparative mixes of tools, it’s no surprise that last month Slack tightened up its bootlaces to take on the role of consolidator, snapping up IP and shutting down Hipchat and Stride from Atlassian, with the latter taking a stake in Slack as part of the deal.

Slack, which has a relatively modest 1,000+ employees, has ruled out an IPO this year, so this latest round will help it shore up cash in the meantime to continue growing, and competing.

Contacted for this story, Slack said that it does not comment on rumors or speculation.