Slack acquires Astro to conquer e-mail – TechCrunch



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Slack announced today that he has acquired Astro, the Bay Area startup behind the email helper, Astrobot. The agreement, which is Slack's most important to date, will help to help the company's popular discussion platform realize its vision of fully integrating into its channels the main systems such as email and email. calendars.

As Slack notes, the company predicted last year that channels would usurp other forms of commercial communications over the next seven years or so. Achieving this optimistic goal, however, will mean convincing business users to move away from pillars such as email.

"We have taken some steps to allow the integration of email in Slack," writes the company, "but we are now able to make this interoperability much simpler and much more powerful. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for teams to move to the most productive sites – in one channel, along with relevant contextual and software tools used by teams, from ServiceNow and Salesforce to Workday and Box.

Astro was founded in 2015 by Zimbra co-founders Andy Pflaum, Roland Schemers and Ross Dargahi. Last year, he introduced Astrobot (with $ 8.3 million financing), a Slack application that integrates email and calendars directly into the chat platform. Among other things, it allows users to search both at once, without leaving Slack.

"And as we explored with Slack how to group messaging, email and calendar," wrote Astro in an article announcing the move, "it became clear we were going.

Stand-alone Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa and Slack applications will be closed in October, and registrations for new users will be disabled immediately. Existing users will still have access to changes made through the app, thanks to synchronization. Most of the company's approximately 30 employees will transition to Slack.

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