- Date
- December 1, 2020
- Kind
- Acquisition
- Significance
- High
On December 1, 2020, Salesforce and Slack Technologies signed a definitive agreement under which Salesforce would acquire Slack. Slack shareholders would receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 of a Salesforce share for each Slack share, which Salesforce said represented an enterprise value of about $27.7 billion based on its closing share price on November 30, 2020.
The rationale Salesforce gave
- Slack would be deeply integrated into every Salesforce cloud and become the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360.
- Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chair and chief executive, called it a match made in heaven; Slack chief executive Stewart Butterfield called it the most strategic combination in the history of software.
- Slack was to continue as an operating unit of Salesforce under Butterfield.
The close
The deal was expected to close in the second quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal 2022. Salesforce’s filing says it completed the acquisition on July 21, 2021, with preliminary consideration of about $27.1 billion, made up of about $15.8 billion in cash and $11.1 billion in Salesforce stock.
Why it matters
It put the place where teams talk next to the system where customer records live, which is the link behind later features such as running marketing campaigns from inside Slack with agents. It was also the largest deal in this timeline.
What happened next
Salesforce completed the acquisition on July 21, 2021. In June 2026 it announced campaign management in Slack using MCP tools (see our coverage of Salesforce's marketing agents).