Casey Newton from the Verge, reporting on the new Slack App Directory and investment fund:

Slack is wrapping up a breakout year with a set of announcements designed to press its advantage as a next-generation productivity app. The team-communication app, which now has 2 million daily users and 570,000 paying customers, has established an $80 million fund to invest in companies who build Slack apps and other products that rely on integration with the company. (The fund is backed by Slack along with venture capital firms Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Spark Growth, and Social + Capital.) Slack has also set up an “app directory” where administrators can browse the 150 integrations that are now available — Twitter, Dropbox, Trello, and Google Drive among them — and install them on their team’s Slack instance.

We use Slack behind the scenes at MacStories and really enjoy using it – out of all the group messaging services we’ve used, it’s easily the best. Part of what makes Slack so great is the way you can integrate third party apps and services with Slack, and as you might imagine, Federico has a lot of fun with that. Which is why this latest announcement from Slack is exciting to us. Slack integrations are now easier than ever to find with the Slack App Directory, and there’s now another incentive for companies and developers to build Slack integrations with the introduction of the investment fund.

If you want to learn more, be sure to read The Verge’s report, or alternatively the announcement on Slack’s official blog.