Amazon Buying Slack? Jeff Bezos' Company May Soon Compete With Facebook, WhatsApp

Retail giant Amazon may soon venture into the instant-messaging arena, which has been dominated by Facebook and Google till now. Bloomberg reported Thursday the corporate chatroom startup, Slack Technologies Inc., has received inquiries about a potential takeover from technology companies including Amazon.

According to the report, Slack might be valued at $9 billion in the deal, which is double of its $4.5 billion valuation at the time of its latest round of funding, announced June 16. Amazon is eyeing Slack, but an agreement is yet to be reached, Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Read: Slack For Mac, Windows And Chrome Updated Version Features Video Calling For Individuals, Groups

The retail giant has been trying to move into the messaging arena for quite some time. It added a paid audio and video chat service called Amazon Chime to its cloud hosting division, Amazon Web Services in February.

Both Amazon and Slack have not yet commented on the report.

It is also not sure yet whether Slack would agree to the acquisition as it is currently pursuing $500 million in fundraising, which would bring its valuation to $5 billion. According to Inc.com, Slack might have plans to go public with an initial public offering soon.

But the retail giant seems keen on competing in the segment of corporate messaging. The company’s Chime service competes with Microsoft’s Skype and Cisco’s WebEx. Amazon also owns a business intelligence service called "Quicksight", which allows its clients to transfer large amounts of data. A tie-up with Slack would mean audio, video and text support for the service.

Slack started as a chat service for video games and has developed into an internal company messenger now with a user base of 5 million daily users. While the offer from Amazon might sound enticing, Slack’s own plans and its potential to raise more funding present another alternative to a takeover, going by previous funding rounds.

While Slack has an open interface — a free one with some paid add-ons — Amazon previously had closed access to its services and only offered it for a paid premium. The recently launched Amazon Chime service is an example of how the company works.

Read: Are Slack Conversations Private? Popular Communications Platform May Not Be As Secure As You Think, Expert Says

Slack also accommodates bots easily and would be an ideal product for Amazon to advance its artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The company is one of the major tech players in the AI sector. In addition to its AI-based evolving voice recognition service, Alexa, the company will gain from Slack’s Search, Learning and Intelligence (SLI) team, which works on such technologies to make the messaging service smarter, if the acquisition goes through.

Another distant possibility is that company might integrate Slack’s technology into its smart speaker range, which uses Alexa currently.