Salesforce is buying the workplace messaging app Slack for $27.7 billion, they announced on Tuesday. It is Salesforce’s largest acquisition ever and represents a more aggressive foray into office communication technology for the cloud giant at a time when remote work has made collaboration tools more essential.
The deal is a combination of cash and stock. Slack shareholders will get $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share. Slack’s stock was down over 3% on the news, while Salesforce shares went were also down about 3%. Before reports of the deal talks, Slack had a market cap of about $17 billion. It was valued at roughly $25 billion when markets closed on Tuesday.
The deal could help Salesforce compete with its longtime rival Microsoft, which has benefited from an explosion in the use of its Microsoft Teams app amid the pandemic.
Slack, meanwhile, hasn’t given an updated number for its daily active users since October 2019, when it had 12 million daily active users.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a press release, “Stewart and his team have built one of the most beloved platforms in enterprise software history, with an incredible ecosystem around it. This is a match made in heaven. Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.”