Slack Hires Goldman Sachs to Lead Its IPO Planned for 2019, Report Says
Slack hired investment bank Goldman Sachs as the lead underwriter for its highly anticipated initial public offering, Reuters reported Friday.
Slack is talking with investment banks to help underwrite an IPO, which could end up valuing the chat and workplace-collaboration software maker as high as $10 billion, Reuters said, citing unnamed sources.
In August, Slack raised $427 million in a private round of financing led by General Atlantic and Dragoneer. At the time, the investment valued the company at more than $7 billion. The company has raised a total of $1.2 billion in seven funding rounds since 2010, according to Crunchbase, which tracks financing rounds of private companies.
Last month, Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s co-founder and CEO, told Fortune that the company had “no specific timeline for an IPO,” although he also said that “We’ve been on a path to public company readiness for several years now and we’re continuing on that path.”
Slack offers a popular work-collaboration platform that allows co-workers to chat and message each other. The nine-year-old company now has more than 8 million active users, although Butterfield said in the Fortune interview that the actual number could be well above that.
The market for technology IPOs had been sluggish for several years before picking up somewhat in 2018. So far in 2018, 188 companies have gone public on U.S. exchanges, up from 160 in all of 2017. Around 40 of the IPOs this year were tech startups, including Sonos, Dropbox, and SurveyMonkey.
2019 is expected to bring bigger names to the IPO market, not just Slack, but also Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. On Thursday, Lyft confidentially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for its planned IPO.
