Workast raises cash to expand beyond Slack with its message-based task management toolkit

Workast, the popular Slack-based task management toolkit, is looking to expand its messaging horizons.

The company, which answered the prayers of everyone who was sick of working with Asana and other task management applications, has raised $1.85 million in a seed round of funding led by Greycroft Partners as it looks to expand to other messaging platforms.

Guillermo Gette says his company’s success has all been due to its focus on conversational interfaces and building off that success; expect to see Workast integrate its task management features with Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Stripe and even Cisco’s chat products.

“Built on top of Slack we have been able to acquire users very quickly,” says Gette. “One out of every seven Slack paying companies are using us.”

Gette said there are now roughly 100,000 active users on a monthly basis that have assigned tasks and monitored their completion using Workast’s tools.

The idea for the company came to Gette while he was working at Expedia. In the early days it was just Gette working on the integration on nights and weekends in 2015; now the company is looking to grow significantly, Gette said.

Following the completion of its current pilot program (est. early 2018), Workast will also roll out a premium label product, which will include reports and analytics, unlimited integrations, guest accounts, templates, custom fields and more, according to Gette.

“Work management tools haven’t changed much in the past 10 years and many current products continue to push a model that hasn’t adapted to the way individuals and teams work and communicate in the workplace,” he said in a statement. “With Workast, we are providing a more effective and efficient platform to track the continuous interactions between individuals and teams — across all channels, from messaging to email to voice and video — in a meaningful and manageable way.”

Featured Image: Bryce Durbin