Slack acquires Astro to help email and channels work together

Editor’s Note: 
As you may have heard, Slack is now a part of Salesforce! This means some of the information below is dated, but we wanted to keep it around for historical context and other good reasons. For more details on Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack, read the official announcement. 

 

We believe that what makes channels so powerful is a thriving platform that brings together conversations, files, and best-of-breed software tools into one streamlined hub for collaboration. More and more, channels are where work happens for teams around the world.

But we all know that email is still a very important tool in business communication. Billions of emails are sent every day, and in those are millions of documents exchanged, contracts negotiated and decisions memorialized. We’ve taken some steps to make it possible to integrate email into Slack, but now we’re in a position to make that interoperability much simpler and much, much more powerful. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to help teams shift conversations to where they would be most productive — in a channel, alongside the relevant context and software tools teams use at work, from ServiceNow and Salesforce to Workday and Box.

To help make this possible, we’ve acquired Astro, a company with deep expertise in email infrastructure and maker of the popular Astrobot for Slack. In Astro, we’re bringing on an incredible team that collectively have built the industry’s best mail and messaging tools like Zimbra, Acompli (acquired by Microsoft, and the foundation for Outlook Mobile), and Mumbo (acquired by LinkedIn). We see this as a natural next step as channel-based collaboration becomes the default way of working.