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Salesforce acquires Slack-bot maker Troops.ai

Sales and revenue communications platform will become part of Slack when the deal closes in 2023.

Salesforce has announced the acquisition of Troops.ai, a revenue and communications platform that uses Slack and Microsoft Teams bots to surface CRM data from platforms such as Salesforce.

Salesforce said in a statement that Troops and its team will become part of Slack — which it acquired in 2020 — when the deal closes in 2023. The terms of the deal were not announced, but Troops.ai had raised $19.4 million to date according to Crunchbase, including investment from Slack’s own venture fund.

The purchase comes two months after Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor told analysts that the vendor doesn’t have “plans for any material M&A in the near term.”

Founded in New York in 2016, Troops aims to help streamline the data management process and provide users with real-time insights surfaced from ‘systems of record’ like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zendesk, into ‘systems of engagement’ like Slack, and Microsoft Teams using software bots.

“We’ve been a leader in the industry, working with some of the fastest-growing companies in the world, including Salesforce and Slack,” Troops’ CEO and cofounder Dan Reich wrote in a blog post

“We’ve done this by delivering real-time insights from systems of record like Salesforce to systems of engagement like Slack, bringing together information and actions that customer-facing teams need to close new deals and support existing customers.”

Since acquiring Slack, Salesforce has continued to benefit financially from the ongoing popularity of the messaging platform. In its latest financial results, Salesforce generated total revenues of US$7.3 billion, an increase of 26 per cent year-on-year and the company said it expects a contribution of US$1.5 billion in sales from Slack in its 2023 fiscal year.