Salesforce acquires Troops.ai to make useful Slack bots

Proving that there’s an appetite for bots, Salesforce today announced that it will acquire Troops.ai, a bot-based service that integrates with Slack to make it easier for sales teams to retrieve and update data across Salesforce’s various systems. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Salesforce said that Troops will become a part of Slack when the acquisition closes in Q2 2023, subject to customary closing conditions.

“When we started Troops, we wanted to reimagine how work gets done. We wanted to make work easier, more intelligent, and more collaborative,” Troops CEO Dan Reich wrote in a blog post this morning. “This announcement marks an incredible milestone in the Troops journey and we’d like to thank our community, our valued customers, our partners, our investors, and our team for all your support and partnership.”

Troops was founded in 2016 by Reich, Scott Britton, and Greg Ratner, who sought to streamline the process of by pulling and pushing customer relationship management data in Salesforce by using Slack as a conduit. Taking the form of an integration between Salesforce, Google Apps, and Slack, with sophisticated data processing and analytics tools on the backend, Troops’ product quickly attracted investor interest — including from Slack’s own Slack Fund. Troops raised $19.4 million in venture capital from Slack Fund, Susa Ventures, Aspect Ventures, Flight.VC, and others prior to the Salesforce purchase.

No word on whether the founding Troops team will join Salesforce in any capacity or what current customers can expect after the deal closes, but we’ve reached out for more information and will update this post once we hear back.

“We’ve been a leader in the industry, working with some of the fastest-growing companies in the world, including Salesforce and Slack,” Reich wrote. “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.”

Salesforce’s snatching up of Troops comes as the tech giant attempts to more tightly integrate Slack with its broader software portfolio. When Salesforce bought Slack in 2020, analysts were skeptical that the company — which paid a substantial premium for Slack shares — could successfully layer the chat platform on top of its existing offerings. In 2020, analysts surveyed by Refinitiv projected that Slack would generate $876.3 million in revenue in fiscal year 2020 in the face of continued competition from rivals such as Microsoft Teams and Google Chat. — a fraction of the $17.1 billion in revenue Salesforce notched that same year.

To reinvigorate its product unification efforts, Salesforce recently unveiled a set of low-code developer tools, Salesforce Platform for Slack, intended to bring Slack and Salesforce’s legacy products closer together. Alongside it, Salesforce released new Slack apps to automate deal status updates, maintain records in Salesforce, assign service cases to team members, and more along those lines.