

Like many of its newly public peers, Slack is not yet profitable. These big-ticket customers comprised 40% of Slack’s $400.6 million in annual revenue for the year ending January 31. This was more than double the number from the year prior. It has marketed itself as a replacement for email.Īs of January, 575 companies paid more than $100,000 per year to Slack, the company said in its prospectus. Slack is a cloud-based messaging platform that allows users to share files, create channels and chat instantaneously with team members around the world. Shares of Slack had traded in a range of between $21.00 per share and $31.50 per share in private transactions during the period of February 1 through May 30, the company said in its prospectus. Last year, Slack was valued privately at $7.1 billion, and had raised more than $1 billion in total private funding since its founding in 2009. Slack's opening share price gave it a market capitalization of $19.4 billion, based on Class A and Class B shares outstanding as listed by the company in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Wednesday. The unusual go-public method – which is less costly for a company and less dilutive to existing shareholders – was also embraced by music-streaming platform Spotify ( SPOT) last year. This also meant no fresh capital was raised ahead of Slack’s public listing. Slack is going public by way of a direct listing, meaning the company did not issue new equity, and employees and other private investors instead converted their stock into publicly tradeable shares. Instead, it served as a starting point as broker-traders initiated buy-sell orders Thursday morning. The reference price was not an offering price from investors, as would be the case in a traditional initial public offering.

Wednesday evening, the NYSE set a reference price for Slack at $26.00 per share.
