Slack Consultancy Bryd Secures $300K to Accelerate Growth and Innovation

Slack consultancy Bryd have just announced a successful $300K funding round that will further fuel the company’s mission to transform workspace communication at a wider scale.

Following this, I got the chance to speak to Bryd’s co-founders, Laurence Fitch and Jacob Campbell to discuss the origins of the company, the ambition going forward, and the current state of Slack.

The Current State of Slack

While this significant investment in Bryd is very much reflective of their rapid growth as a company, there have been a lot of conversations more recently regarding the effectiveness of Slack and how it is performing in general.

Salesforce acquired Slack for a monumental $27.7B in 2021 – the company’s most expensive business purchase ever. Many in the ecosystem however believe that Salesforce may have overpaid for Slack and since have not done a lot to enhance it.

When asking Laurence and Jacob about the current landscape of Slack, they remained optimistic about the platform’s future:

“I think it’s naturally taken some time for Slack to find its place across the Salesforce ecosystem, both from a product sense and a go-to-market sense,” Jacob said. 

“From a product perspective, Slack has released a whole suite of capabilities ranging from Canvas to Lists to Workflow Builder as well as a whole host of integrations into the Salesforce ecosystem.”

“What we’ll start to see even more now is a renewed excitement around Slack offering that view or access into these different parts of the Salesforce ecosystem, but having a single place for you to communicate with your colleagues as well as the tools that you use on a day-to-day basis.”

Slack has also undergone changes at the top of the company, with Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris taking over as CTO at the beginning of this year. This felt like a necessary step for many, with Laurence and Jacob praising the changes and updates made so far under the new regime:

“The new teams that we have, Denise [Dresser], Kaylin [Voss], and Parker, coming from Salesforce, there is a renewed strategy around how it much more tightly integrates into the Salesforce ecosystem,” Laurence said.

“I’m getting a lot more value from the product and there’s more and more being released on those tools. And I see that kind of Slack being the single pane of glass for many of the Salesforce products only increasing with the likes of Parker at the helm.”

What is Bryd?

Slack is one of the biggest workplace communications apps in the world and is used by companies such as Comcast, Goldman Sachs, and AirBnB using it on a daily basis (as well as here at Salesforce Ben!). More and more businesses are starting to integrate onto the platform, but need help navigating the complexities of Slack and how to successfully make the most of the wide-ranging tool.

This is where Bryd comes in. Whether you are new to the platform or have been using it for an extended period, Bryd helps elevate your Slack experience by offering services such as implementation, customization, training, and overall support. 

In just a year since its founding, Bryd has established a formidable global presence, serving customers in 25 countries from its headquarters in Singapore. Laurence and Jacob started this business with a breadth of both Slack and Salesforce knowledge, having worked at Slack before founding Bryd:

“We both used to work at Slack and worked on different sides of the coin – I was an account executive selling Slack to enterprise customers around Asia and Jacob was a customer success and implementation consultant,” said Laurence.

“I think both Jacob and I got a great window into how Slack could be used in a more thoughtful and built-out way across most clients who were using it mainly for basic messaging. So we put our heads together to form one of the first Slack consultancies.”

The Strategy Going Forward

Following this $300K investment, the strategy for Bryd going forward is simple – upscale. The company have a real ambition to widen their horizons across the globe and expand their offerings:

“We’re planning to build our delivery center located in various parts of the world to ensure that we can continue to really meet our clients’ demands. Slack is very much being positioned as that window into the Salesforce ecosystem, so it’s a natural progression for us to start to be able to offer that view and offer services around Salesforce implementation as well.”

“We want to use this funding to essentially scale as quickly as we can to be known as the go-to global Slack partner across the world to help you with any kind of Slack-related or Slack-plus Salesforce-related project, whether that be big or small.”

Summary

The future looks very bright for Bryd, who are now well-positioned to continue their growth worldwide and become a leading provider for the continued integration of Slack for businesses.

Let us know what you think about this acquisition in the comments!