Salesforce acquires Slack for $27.7 billion, marking its biggest deal ever

Last week, we wrote about Salesforce after multiple reports that the cloud software vendor was in talks to buy Slack, an enterprise software platform for teams and businesses. Salesforces just announced this evening that it’s buying chat software developer Slack for an enterprise value of $27.7 billion, according to a report from CNBC.

The deal, which includes a combination of stock and cash, makes its Salesforce’s largest acquisition since its $15.3 billion purchase of Tableau last year and the $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft in 2018. The acquisition will enable Salesforce to compete against Microsoft in yet another market, with the companies already going head-to-head in sales software, data visualization, and productivity tools.

Salesforce has been on an acquisition spree lately. In 2018, Salesforce acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, the company’s biggest deal ever at the time, to help connect cloud applications. The following year it spent more than twice that amount on Tableau, acquiring the data visualization company for $15.3 billion. Below is Salesforce’s top ten acquisitions.

The acquisition of Slack would be one of the biggest software deals ever for the tech industry. It would rank among Microsoft’s $27 billion purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 and Facebook’s $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014.

“This would be a game-changer move for Benioff & Co. to further build out its collaboration engine and product footprint as cloud spending ramps across the enterprise,” Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives told CNBC, referring to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Founded in 2009 by Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, Serguei Mourachov, and Stewart Butterfield, Slack is a popular workplace chat app that allows teams and businesses of all sizes to communicate effectively. The slack software platform is used by global Fortune 100 companies.