“Slack wants to go public at the beginning of 2019.

“Slack wants to go public at the beginning of 2019.

Slack Technologies is expected to be listed on the stock exchange within the next few months. At the moment, a team from the company seems to be actively preparing for this IPO. The intention would be to enter the stock market in the first half of 2019.

That’s what the Wall Street Journal reports today based on anonymous sources within the company. According to these sources, Slack has not yet attracted a bank to manage the IPO, but it is about to do so. The company expects it to be worth over seven billion dollars at the time of the IPO. This is based, among other things, on a recent investment round, in which Slack raised 427 million dollars.

Rapid expansion

At the most recent investment round, the Dragoneseer Investment Group and General Atlantic, among others, put a lot of money into Slack. Even before the company started that round, Slack would have considered making an IPO. Indeed, the sources of the Wall Street Journal state that this was already looked at in 2017.

Over the past few months, Slack has become quite popular. Last May it exceeded the limit of eight million daily active users, two million more than in September 2017. This is partly due to Slack’s rather aggressive acquisition strategy. Last July, it took over competitors Hipchat and Stride.

The fair on

The news that Slack is also planning to make an IPO fits in with a lot of other previous reports about tech companies that are planning to make an IPO. For example, Uber wants to go public in the course of next year. This also applies to Lyft, which wants to make an IPO in March or April.

In the past ten days there have also been two tech companies that actually went on the stock exchange. First, Eventbrite raised $230 million at the time of its IPO and then SurveyMonkey raised $180 million.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.