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Slack has raised another huge tranche of money. And while a good chunk of its $427 million Series H will likely be spent preserving market dominance, the additional capital presumably gives the enterprise chat service more room to acquire what it needs to scale. (A Slack representative declined to comment on how its recent raise may impact acquisition strategy.)

Slack has, according to Crunchbase, acquired five known companies and products since 2014, most of which have added core functionality to Slack鈥檚 product over the years.

Stride And HipChat

Atlassian, a public software company that develops collaboration tools like JIRA aimed at developers, was once in possession of two Slack competitors: and .

HipChat, which languished under Slack鈥檚 shadow for years, was one of the first enterprise messaging apps to hit the market. It over the years. Meanwhile, Stride, which was launched a year ago, was Atlassian鈥檚 formal attempt to compete directly against Slack鈥檚 platform.

But for Atlassian, competing with Slack wasn鈥檛 a fruitful endeavor. On July 26, Slack announced that it had acquired the intellectual property behind Atlassian鈥檚 two chat properties, with a plan to migrate users of both HipChat and Stride over to Slack. Atlassian, in turn, made a small investment in its former competitor. Terms of the deal were not disclosed by either Slack or Atlassian.

Missions

One of Slack鈥檚 goals, according to a Google Ad, is to help companies integrate their tools under the Slack ecosystem. So it鈥檚 no wonder Slack would be interested in acquiring a startup that made such integrations easy to create for its users.

, a platform that lets users automate tasks and build workflows in Slack, was acquired by the enterprise chat app on July 17th, according to Crunchbase鈥攕hortly before Slack acquired the IP behind Stride and Hipchat. At face value, Missions is well-suited to accomplish Slack鈥檚 goal of making itself a hub for third-party tools and integrations.

Slack nor Missions disclosed the terms of the deal. , Missions will continue to operate free of charge and be into Slack鈥檚 core platform.

Screenhero

While Slack started out as a chat client, it has grown over the years to encompass more functionality, including group video calling.

In 2015, Slack acquired , which served as Slack鈥檚 catalyst for entering the group video chat space. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Screenhero was a seed-stage, Y Combinator-backed startup with $1.8 million in funding at the time of its sale. Screenhero CEO Jahanzeb Sherwani when the acquisition was announced it was 鈥渦nder no pressure to sell from anyone, but we were using Slack; we were spending more time in it. The product is great, and so is the team. It seemed like a natural fit.鈥�

Screenhero鈥檚 entire team moved to Slack. Eventually, the product was shut down and was integrated into the Slack platform.

Spaces

Slack snapped up one of Google Docs鈥� few competitors in 2014. , the company Slack swallowed, allowed remote workers to collaborate real-time in documents. It was Slack鈥檚 first acquisition, and like its later acquisitions, terms of the deals were not disclosed.

According to Crunchbase, Spaces received seed-stage capital from Canyon Creek Capital, the amount of which was not publicly disclosed. Following the acquisition, , the Co-Founder and CEO of Spaces, became a senior product manager at Slack. He is now the CEO of Flight, which appears to be in stealth mode. Hans Larsen, a Google engineer and a co-founder of Spaces, also did a short stint at Slack and then returned to Google as a senior software engineer.

Acquired To Integrate

There is a trend among Slack鈥檚 half-dozen acquisitions: it isn鈥檛 interested in acquiring startups or property that operate as stand-alone entities. Eventually, all of Slack鈥檚 acquisitions are worked into its core product in some way. Or in the case of Atlassian鈥檚 Stride and HipChat, users are converted wholesale to the Slack platform.

It also hasn鈥檛 made very splashy acquisitions, at least none that are known. This could change, however, as the company鈥檚 horde grows and its competition with Teams grows.

But for those entrepreneurs, that may mean finding a comfortable home at the expense of independence.

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