Slack has announced it has acquired AI-influenced email software provider Astro - and its first step is to shut down its service.

Visitors to Astro's site will be met with the news that the company's apps for Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa and Slack will be shut down on October 10, while new users will no longer be able to sign up.

Andy Pflaum, CEO of Astro, wrote: "We started in 2015 with a mission to bring intelligence to workplace communications, starting with email. We know email continues...

Slack has announced it has raised an additional $427 million (£332m) of investment in a series H equity round, taking the company’s post-money valuation to more than $7.1 billion.

The round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group and General Atlantic, joining T. Rowe Price Associates Inc, as well as Wellington Management, Baillie Gifford and Sands Capital.

“The way people work is...

The efficient management of sensitive and confidential documents is crucial to the completion of a smooth M&A process.

From a seller’s perspective, decisions need to be made throughout the process about who has access to what information, due to competition and privacy concerns. From a buyer’s perspective, the transaction will only proceed once the...

Software as a service collaboration platform provider Smartsheet is to acquire Converse.AI to help give the company another ‘step forward’ in its ethos on automation in the workplace.

The Washington-based firm aims to give organisations a one-stop-shop with wide visibility on projects through collaborative dashboards, widgets, calendars, and more. Customers include more than half of the Fortune 500, including Netflix and Cisco. Converse.AI integrates with enterprise social products such as Slack,...

Progress Software has announced the acquisition of backend as a service (BaaS) technology provider Kinvey for $49 million (£37.8m).

Kinvey, with customers including NBCUniversal, Schneider Electric and VMware, enables organisations to build apps in minutes. The company was named as a leader in the Forrester Wave for mobile development platforms towards the end of 2016, with its platform being awarded a patent the...

Smartsheet, a software as a service (SaaS) collaboration platform based in Washington, has raised $52.1 million (£40.2m) in series F funding.

The company said the capital will be used to accelerate product, sales, marketing and infrastructure to support its platform ‘building upon an already solid financial position with low cash burn’.

Smartsheet’s product enables enterprise-wide collaboration through file sharing, alerts and reminders to enable ‘all notes, comments, files, and...

Signal Sciences, a California-based security engineering provider, has raised $15 million (£11.6m) in series B funding as well as launching what it describes as a ‘new category’ of web application security solutions.

The Web Protection Platform (WPP), designed by former Etsy engineers and security leaders, aims to provide comprehensive threat protection for web applications, microservices, and APIs on any platform. Though building web apps is an essential and core part of every business, the...

Sapho, a San Bruno-based enterprise mobility provider, has secured $14 million (£10.9m) in an oversubscribed series B funding round, with the aim to build out a global sales team.

The $14m adds to the company’s $9.5m series A secured in June last year, taking its total to $27.85m across five rounds. The latest round was led by Caffeinated Capital, with other parties including new investor Felicis Ventures, as well as Alsop Louie Partners, SoftTech VC, Morado Ventures, AME Cloud, and Bloomberg...

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Application security provider Arxan Technologies has announced the acquisition of mobile app management (MAM) provider Apperian to help its mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) push.

Discussions between the two companies had been going on for almost a year with a plethora of options on the table, from strategic partnerships to investment, before settling on acquisition because both companies’ management “felt that there were so many synergies that the companies could maximise impact and...

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Productivity app provider Trello is to be acquired by enterprise software firm Atlassian for $425 million, the two companies have announced.

Trello, which was featured in an Enterprise AppsTech article from 2014 outlining top apps for business executives, was launched five years ago, making it truly a company of the smartphone generation. The company boasts almost 20 million users, including customers such as Google, National...