When we started the Slack Fund, we thought a great deal about what it takes to build an ecosystem — an ecosystem where a good idea can become a lasting business, and where we, together with our developers and partners, can dramatically shape the future of work for the better. To build this kind of ecosystem you need a shared mission, great developer products, a solid distribution mechanism and finally, to help apps make it in the long run, money.

Seven months have passed since we launched the Slack Fund, and in that time we have made eleven new investments. This means we have a total of fourteen Slack-funded companies building products that enable our customers and developers to do more with Slack. We have now deployed $1.97M of our own capital, and the greater venture capital community has invested over $30M in these teams.

An ecosystem like ours is shared. Our impact as a platform is inherently and inevitably tied to the success of our partners and developers. As just one example, Growbot has over 4,800 teams celebrating achievements and improving culture with their bot. Companies funded by Slack represent only a tiny slice of the broader Slack platform — there are now over 600 apps in our App Directory, 200 added in the last two months, and 90% of paid teams on Slack actively use apps.

These are all very promising signs, and they bolster our belief that this is our collective moment to shape the way that millions of people do their jobs. This is why we have the Slack Fund: to help teams join us in building the future of work. New additions to the Slack Fund range from companies expanding the ways that HR and Sales work in Slack, to developer tools that bring natural language processing to bots. We are proud to introduce you to the companies we’ve funded since December. If your team is interested in funding from Slack, you can learn more about it on the new Slack Fund website.