Slack Acquires Missions Add-On

July 17, 2018

A popular Canadian workflow communication platform has announced a new acquisition.

Slack has acquired Missions, an add-on for the platform that was developed by Robots & Pencils, a digital agency based in Cleveland but founded in Calgary. Missions allows Slack users to create their own workflows to automate processes within the company that pop up very often. This could include employee reviews or onboarding.

“The Missions team has built on Slack for a long time, and they are deeply familiar with our product and our customers’ needs,” said Brian Elliott, Slack’s general manager of platform. “Together, we’ll be able to unlock the power of the platform for a whole new set of Slack users, and ultimately help teams get work done more quickly.”

Missions was developed with Robots & Pencils’ FunLabs program, an internal initiative that encourages employees to build projects they deem interesting and fulfilling. This kind of program helps to describe the vision that Robots & Pencils has built: a sustainable and entrepreneurial company culture rooted in creativity and new ways of thinking.

The team that built Missions will be leaving Robots & Pencils and joining Slack’s workforce, though the door is still open for them to act as voluntary advisors—known as Robots & Pencils fellows—according to a statement.

“We built Missions because we care about helping people work together across all parts of a business, not just within IT,” said Missions co-founder and CEO Mike Brevoort. “We’ve believed for a long time that the collaboration hub model is the future of work, and by joining Slack, we’re able to massively scale up this vision and our impact on teams at work.”

Slack will integrate Missions into their platform and build on its technology to boost team productivity through automation, all without ever having to write code. The goal is for Slack to one day use Missions to streamline the hiring of new employees, build internal ticketing flows to triage worker requests, and manage candidate approvals and rejections.

The Vancouver-born Slack is one of Canada’s most notable tech companies and one of the country’s few true unicorns. The platform has over nine million weekly active users and 50,000 paying teams and companies. Missions is the third acquisition for the company.