Updated Slack & # 39; Investors' Day and Finance: E-mail Replacement

The professional email service Slack informed investors Monday because the company hoped to be able to go public with a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange at the end of the year.

Slack provided updated information in an amendment to its initial public offer file, ahead of its presentation to investors. For the quarter ended April 30, Slack's revenues were estimated at $ 133.8 to $ 134.8 million, compared with $ 80.9 million for the same period last year. Slack's net loss increased from $ 26.3 million to $ 39 million in the quarter.

The service, which primarily addresses businesses, said it had more than 10 million users in January.

Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack, told investors that Slack's replacement of email was changing the way company employees communicate.

"This change is inevitable, we believe that each organization will switch to Slack or something like that," said Butterfield in a presentation.

He also introduced Slack as a software-centric company and convinced that the world is "only at the beginning" of its dependence on software. In this essence, Butterfield compared Slack to eventually becoming a utility, similar to the Internet or electricity.

"The world will continue to use more and more software and we are deliberately trying to put ourselves in a position where Slack is gaining value as the company increasingly uses software as Slack the product becomes more valuable to our customers more of software, "said Butterfield.

Slack is the latest addition to a series of large technology companies that are going public. But instead of a traditional IPO, the service will list its shares directly on the NYSE. This is the second major technology company in the last year to opt for direct registration after Spotify. The Slack symbol will be SK.

Similar to the recent IPOs of Lyft and Pinterest, Slack will offer two classes of shares to consolidate the voting power of its major shareholders. Class A common shares of Slack will receive one vote per share, while Class B will receive 10 votes per share.

Disclosure: Comcast Ventures, the venture arm of Comcast, is investing in Slack. Comcast owns the parent company CNBC, NBCUniversal.