Salesforce is in talks to buy Slack, deal could be announced as early as next week

Salesforce is in talks to acquire Slack, an enterprise software platform that allows teams and businesses. The deal could be announced as soon as next week, according to news first the Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter.

If the deal goes through, Slack would be Salesforce’s largest acquisition. The total amount of the deal is still unclear at this point. However, Slack’s market cap skyrockets to more than $20 billion following the WSJ’s original report.

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.