Workplace collaboration startup Slack has made its first acquisition as it prepares to compete more directly with software giants like Google and Microsoft .
The company has acquired Spaces, a two-person, bootstrapped team led by serial entrepreneur Simon Vallee, Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield said in an interview. Terms of the deal, which was done all in stock, were not disclosed.
Spaces, founded last year by Vallee and former Google engineer Hans Larsen, had been developing a program to let remote workers collaborate on the same document simultaneously. That technology will now form the basis of a new document editing tool that Slack aims to include in its software later this year, Butterfield said.
Slack is branching out to offer more types of collaboration tools to the more than 200,000 people who use the site daily, a number that has doubled in the past 11 weeks. Just as its messaging features are designed to replace the need for email, Slack plans to offer new tools like the document editor to keep users working inside the app instead of in apps like Google Docs or Microsoft Office 360.
“We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for people to bring all kinds of disparate digital information together in one bundle,” Butterfield said.
The document editing tool will let several users collaborate on one document, view the editing history and drag links and other objects into a document.
Other applications Slack has considered building are calendars and task management, he said.
Slack is adding about $1 million in annual recurring revenue a month while burning less than $500,000 a month, he said. The company charges businesses at least $7 a month per user for extra features. Slack’s paid customers total about 60,000 users.
Slack has raised $60 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners and Social + Capital. It was created last year by Butterfield, who previously co-founded photo-sharing site Flickr and sold it to Yahoo in 2005.
The CEO said he is looking to expand Slack’s staff team of 53 by hiring a vice president of marketing and growing its sales team.
Spaces is the third startup Vallee has sold to a larger tech company. He sold website creation tool Sitemasher to Salesforce in 2008 and another startup, reservation-booking tool OpenCal, to Groupon in 2011.
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