Slack officially launches its business operations in India

US-based workplace communication platform, Slack, has officially announced the launch of its business operations in India.   

Seeing an increased demand for collaboration tools among businesses, Slack officials said that “their mission is to help Indian companies in their transition to a hybrid workplace and being the Digital HQ”, which according to Slack, is a “digital workplace that’s fast, flexible and inclusive for a work-from-anywhere world”.  

Slack has users in over 150 countries globally and already has a significant following in India. The company has been operating in India for four years, establishing a product engineering team in Pune in 2018 following the company’s acquisition of US-based email infrastructure Astro, and the maker of the popular Astrobot for Slack.  

Slack’s Country Manager, India, Rahul Sharma, said that the India team has since grown to include a go-to-market function in the last year, and now has over 120 employees across four offices in Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore and Gurgaon. The sales operations will be spread across the four cities. 

The company’s CEO and Co-founder, Stewart Butterfield said that “the country now represents one of the largest free user bases for Slack and positioned in its top 10 markets for paid teams globally”.  

“We have a significant footprint in big global tech companies with a major presence in India, like IBM, Amazon, Oracle, and Intuit. India is also a major focus for Slack due to the presence of large systems integrators, like Wipro and TCS,” Sharma told Tech Circle.   

Indian companies, unicorns and start-ups such as Zomato, Dreamsports, Freecharge, Razorpay, Meesho, among others are relying on Slack to drive their businesses forward.   

“India has the second largest SMB (small and medium business) market in the world, and that has always been a sweet spot for Slack due to our low barriers to entry and the usability of the product,” Sharma added.   

In July 2021, tech company Salesforce completed the acquisition of Slack. Salesforce has had a presence in India since 2005 and has over 6,500 employees across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.