Facebook Acquires Team Messaging Platform Redkix for Its Slack Competitor

Facebook is acquiring team messaging startup Redkix today. Redkix founders announced on Thursday that the firm will be joining Facebook to work on the social network giant’s Workplace product.

Workplace by Facebook is the firms take on team communication and collaboration software like Slack and Microsoft Teams. The product can be used by organizations and small businesses to communicate within the company. With the Redkix acquisition, Facebook will be able to better integrate email into Workplace.

Redkix’s platform allows users to communicate within a team via email. The service lets anyone with an email address be a part of the team, and communicate using their regular email clients without needing to actually Redkix. For those with a Redkix account, they get access to features like read receipts, real-time messaging, and all the other features you’d expect on a team communication software. You also get access to your entire email inbox and calendar, so you don’t have to leave Redkix to check your work email, ever.

“We are excited to announce that we have agreed to be acquired by Facebook, where we’ll join the Workplace team to help connect people and give the world a place to work together. Our current application will wind down,” Redkix’s founders said in a blog post, announcing the acquisition. Both the companies are yet to announce how Redkix will be integrated into Workplace, but my guess is that Facebook is only really interested in Redkix’s email integration mechanism.

With Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Slack investing heavily in team communication services, competition in the market has never been higher before. Microsoft only recently launched a free version of Teams to compete directly with Slack’s product, and Facebook also has a free version of Workplace. Most of these services are absurdly identical to Slack, which was really the original product, but companies like Microsoft have been trying to differentiate by connecting Teams to a broader platform like Microsoft 365.