Monday, September 24, 2018

We’re excited to announce that Astro is being acquired by Slack! Slack is the maker of the fastest-growing enterprise app in history, and we’re joining them to help connect email and calendaring to all the work teams do in Slack.

On Wednesday October 10, we’ll shut down our Astro apps for Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa, and Slack. As of today, we’ve also disabled signups of new users. For current users of the Astro apps — because we continually sync data with Gmail & Office 365 accounts, you can switch to email apps from Google, Microsoft, Apple or other providers without seeing any changes in your messages or calendar events. (Just remember not to leave behind any messages in Astro that you snoozed or scheduled to send after October 10 since those messages will no longer be available after that date.)

The past few years have been a remarkable journey at Astro. We started in 2015 with a mission to bring intelligence to workplace communications, starting with email. We know email continues to be a critical way to communicate in the workplace, but for most people email is noisy, it’s not well organized, and it distracts us from doing our best work.

We founded Astro with a team of experts in email and workplace communications, including Roland Schemers and Ross Dargahi who’d been co-founders and engineering leaders of Zimbra, the leading open source email and collaboration product. Others at Astro had been business and technical leaders at Zimbra; at the mobile email company Acompli (acquired in 2014 by Microsoft); and at the mobile messaging company Mumbo (acquired in 2012 by LinkedIn).

So last year we launched Astro’s intelligent apps for users of Microsoft and Google email & calendar, to help people focus on their most important messages and relationships. We had a great response from users and teams, and several honors such as Product Hunt naming us mobile app of the year, and Gartner naming us a ‘Cool Vendor’ for AI in the Digital Workplace.

We also wanted to bring together email with another critical medium of workplace communications, team messaging. So mid-last year we added our Slack app, Astrobot, to connect email, calendar & Slack. For example Astro users could do a single search and get results back from both Slack and email, they could manage their most important emails in Slack, and without leaving Slack they could check what’s next on their Office 365 or Google calendar.

In bringing Astrobot to market, we developed a strong partnership with Slack. Slack has an amazingly loyal global user base of more than 8 million daily users, and many of our most passionate users are active & happy Slack users. And as we explored with Slack how to bring together messaging, email & calendar, it became evident that we would have the biggest impact on workplace communications and realize our original vision by joining Slack.

So here we are today, excited to build the future of interoperability between Slack messaging, email and calendaring. We look forward to sharing this with you soon.

We’d like to thank you, our users, for whom we built this company, and for whom we look forward to serving further as part of Slack. We’re grateful to our entire team for the commitment and excellent work of the past few years. And we’re thankful to our investors, Satish Dharmaraj at Redpoint Ventures, Theresia Gouw at Aspect Ventures, Michael Dearing at Harrison Metal, and Kent Goldman of Upside Partnership. Their support, wisdom, and unvarnished feedback has been invaluable to us.

You can read more about today’s announcement at Slack’s blog, and please contact us with any questions.

Thank you,

Andy Pflaum, CEO and Team Astro