Slack Technologies, Inc.

Slack Technologies, Inc. — commonly "Slack" — is a workplace communications software company headquartered at 500 Howard Street, San Francisco, California. It was incorporated in Delaware in 2009 as Tiny Speck, Inc. (founded by Stewart Butterfield and colleagues from Flickr, with early operations in Vancouver), and renamed Slack Technologies, Inc. in 2014. It went public on the NYSE via direct listing in June 2019 (ticker WORK) and was acquired by Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE: CRM) in July 2021 in a roughly $27.7 billion cash-and-stock deal. Slack now operates as a wholly owned Salesforce subsidiary and continues to use its own brand; Salesforce does not break out Slack revenue or headcount in its filings. Third-party workforce trackers (e.g., Revelio Labs) estimated Slack at roughly 1,800–2,000 employees in early 2026, and press reports citing Salesforce have put Slack revenue in the ~$1.7–3 billion range — figures not confirmed by company filings.

Products / operations: Slack is an operating company, not an NPE. Its core product is the Slack channel-based messaging and collaboration platform for enterprises, sold primarily via paid subscription plans (Free, Pro, Business+, Enterprise Grid) and used by organizations to replace internal email. Offerings include Slack Connect (cross-organization messaging), Slack Canvas, Huddles (audio), workflow automation and app integrations, and AI features under the Salesforce umbrella. Slack's technology originated as an internal tool built during development of Tiny Speck's game Glitch.

Patent-litigation posture: Tracked data shows Slack as a defendant in one case and as plaintiff in zero — the classic posture of an operating company being sued, not a litigant asserting its own patents. The single tracked matter, Honeyman Cipher Solutions LLC v. Slack Technologies, Inc. (1:20-cv-01076), was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado in April 2020 — not a traditional plaintiff-friendly venue such as the Eastern District of Texas or Delaware.

Notable case context: Honeyman Cipher Solutions LLC is a Delaware-formed entity widely characterized as a patent assertion entity (NPE). Its complaint against Slack, filed alongside suits against Adidas, ASICS, Evernote, PayPal, and Asana, asserted U.S. Patent 5,991,399 and targeted the use of Apple's iTunes Connect and Google's Android Developer Console to register and distribute apps. Slack's case was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff on April 30, 2020, roughly two weeks after filing.