Slack Technologies, a start-up in the workplace messaging arena, has invested a total of $1.97m in 14 other start-ups.
The investment was made through its the $80m Stack Fund, announced in late 2015. Recently, Slack was valued at $3.8bn.
The company provides messaging services for co-workers to chat, transfer files and send pictures and GIFs. Slack is taking major steps to establish a wider productivity platform.
Currently, there are more than 600 apps in Slack's App Directory, of which 200 were added in the last two months.
It has also teamed up with several venture capitals in pursuing them to invest in promising start-ups, as part of larger early-stage rounds. Slack invested about $2m from its own capital and secured $30m in venture funding.
The company announced 11 new investments in businesses including Abacus, Automat, Birdly, Butter.ai, Candor, Growbot, Konsus, Lattice, Myra Labs, Sudo and Wade & Wendy.
Slack said new additions to its fund range from companies expanding the ways that HR and Sales work, to developer tools that bring natural language processing to bots.
When Slack Fund was announced, it also revealed Botkit, a framework developed by Howdy to simplify the development of apps and especially bots.
Apart from this Slack also introduced Slack App Directory, a repository for Slack’s clients to find apps, placed under categories such as design, marketing, office management, developer tools and productivity.
