Canadian communications rocket ship Slack announced yesterday that it has acquired email startup Astro (terms of the deal were not disclosed). With 28 employees at the company, the acquisition is Slack’s largest to date.
Astro made a popular email client for Mac, Android, and iOS. The company also made the Astrobot Slack app, which connected email and calendar to the communications app. Following the acquisition, both will be shut down.
“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,” the company said in a statement. “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.”
In July, Slack also acquired both Stride and Hipchat from Atlassian. Last month, the company raised $427 million USD at a $7.1 billion valuation.
