As artificial intelligence reshapes how work gets done, a group of former Meta engineers is arguing that enterprise communication tools have fallen behind the curve. Their answer is a new startup, Slashwork, which is positioning itself as a post-Slack, post-Teams collaboration platform designed from the ground up for an AI-driven workplace.

Slashwork on Wednesday announced it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding, drawing support from some of the most influential figures behind the very tools it now hopes to challenge. Backers include Slack co-founder Cal Henderson and Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, the investment firm of former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

The London-based startup was founded by Jackson Gabbard, David Miller, and Josh Watzman, all former Facebook engineers. Their pitch is straightforward but ambitious: most enterprise communication platforms in use today were built for a pre-generative AI world and are struggling to adapt.

“We didn’t want to start with, ‘How do we add AI to Slack-like software,’” Gabbard said. “We wanted to ask what enterprise communication should look like if you assume AI is native, not an afterthought.”

A post-Workplace moment

Slashwork’s launch comes against the backdrop of Meta’s decision to shut down Facebook Workplace, the enterprise collaboration tool it introduced in 2016 and formally wound down in 2024. Workplace, which mimicked Facebook’s social feed for corporate use, once reached millions of paid users globally but ultimately failed to become a core strategic priority for Meta as the company pivoted toward AI and immersive technologies.

That closure left a vacuum — both in the market and among the engineers who had built and maintained the product. Several of them are now behind Slashwork, carrying forward lessons from Workplace’s rise and decline.

Julien Codorniou, who led Facebook Workplace from launch to roughly 11 million paid subscribers, now sits on Slashwork’s board and oversaw its incubation. He said the fundamental limitation of today’s dominant tools is that they were designed for conversations between people, not between people and intelligent systems.

“Slack, Teams, Zoom — they’re all more than a decade old,” Codorniou said. “They were optimized for human-to-human communication. With AI, you unlock people talking to systems, and that changes everything.”

AI embedded, not bolted on

Unlike incumbents that are layering AI features onto existing products, Slashwork is embedding large language models into every piece of content from the outset. Messages, posts, images, and shared files all carry LLM embeddings, enabling more sophisticated search and retrieval than traditional keyword-based systems.

Users can instruct AI agents to surface forgotten conversations, locate images that never gained traction in a channel, or summarize threads that span weeks or months. Gabbard said this approach is designed to reduce what he describes as the “invisible tax” of modern work — time lost searching across chats, emails, and documents.

“People don’t remember where something was posted, or even exactly how it was phrased,” he said. “AI can fill in those gaps in a way older systems simply can’t.”

That vision has resonated with early investors who have seen multiple generations of workplace software cycles.

AJ Tennant, a former Facebook sales executive and one of Slack’s earliest sales leaders, said AI-native communication could address long-standing inefficiencies in enterprise collaboration.

“Communication tools today are great at moving messages around,” Tennant said. “What they don’t do well is help you actually get work done. AI agents embedded into communication can close that gap.”

Other early backers include former Meta executives David Fischer, Carolyn Everson, and AJ Tennant, underscoring the extent to which Slashwork is drawing on Meta’s alumni network.

Entering a crowded battlefield

Slashwork is launching into a fiercely competitive market dominated by Salesforce’s Slack and Microsoft Teams, both of which are deeply integrated into corporate IT environments and are rapidly rolling out their own AI features. Microsoft, in particular, has tied Teams closely to its Copilot AI strategy, while Salesforce is positioning Slack as a hub for AI-powered workflows.

The challenge for Slashwork will be convincing companies to adopt a new platform at a time when collaboration fatigue is already high. Gabbard acknowledged the difficulty but said the startup is deliberately starting small.

Slashwork is initially rolling out to smaller, tech-focused companies, with a broader launch planned later in the year. The company plans to keep headcount lean, using the funding primarily for product development, design refinement, and rapid iteration rather than aggressive sales expansion.

A bet on the next decade of work

Beyond features, Slashwork’s broader argument is that enterprise communication is entering a structural shift. As AI systems become active participants in work — drafting content, retrieving information, and coordinating tasks — tools designed purely around chat threads and channels may struggle to keep up.

For Codorniou, the opportunity lies in reimagining communication not just as conversation, but as an interface between humans and intelligent systems.

“The next generation of tools won’t just help people talk,” he said. “They’ll help people think, decide, and execute — together with AI.”

With backing from veterans who helped build the last era of workplace software, the startup is making a clear bet: that the AI era demands not incremental upgrades, but a clean break from how enterprise communication has worked for the past decade.

Uber Technologies Inc. reported stronger-than-expected revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2025, driven by robust growth in both its mobility and delivery segments, yet shares slipped in premarket trading on Wednesday, as investors parsed the results through the lens of rising autonomous vehicle (AV) ambitions and ongoing profitability concerns.

Adjusted earnings per share came in at 71 cents, while revenue reached $14.37 billion—surpassing the LSEG consensus estimate of $14.32 billion and climbing 20% from $12 billion a year earlier. Gross bookings hit $54.1 billion, topping StreetAccount’s $53.1 billion forecast.

The mobility segment, Uber’s core ride-hailing business, generated $8.2 billion in revenue, up 19% year-over-year, though it fell slightly short of StreetAccount’s $8.3 billion expectation. Delivery, encompassing Uber Eats and expanding grocery/retail services, posted the strongest growth at 30% to $4.9 billion, beating estimates of $4.72 billion.Net income for the quarter was $296 million, a sharp decline from $6.88 billion in the prior-year period, largely due to a $1.6 billion net pre-tax headwind from revaluations of equity investments.

Excluding such non-operating items, profitability trends remained solid, supported by disciplined cost management and scale efficiencies. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi struck an optimistic tone in prepared remarks ahead of the earnings call, highlighting delivery as the company’s fastest-growing segment in 2025, particularly in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Strategic partnerships with OpenTable (for restaurant reservations), Shopify (for e-commerce integration), and major grocers such as Loblaws (Canada), Biedronka (Poland), Seiyu (Japan), and Coles (Australia) fueled the expansion, broadening Uber Eats beyond food into everyday retail. The company also underscored progress in its Uber One subscription program, noting that members book more rides and purchase more items across the platform after subscribing.

Advertising revenue continued to gain traction, with Khosrowshahi pointing to integrations with generative AI tools like ChatGPT to enhance discovery—enabling users to explore services and restaurants before completing checkouts. A significant portion of the shareholder deck and call focused on Uber’s accelerating shift toward autonomous vehicles.

Khosrowshahi reiterated his conviction—first voiced a year earlier—that AVs represent a “multi-trillion dollar opportunity” and “fundamentally amplify the strengths of our existing platform.” In Atlanta and Austin, Texas, where Uber offered autonomous rides in 2025, overall trip growth “significantly accelerated” even for human-driven vehicles. In San Francisco, where Waymo operates driverless services via its own app and partners with Uber, Khosrowshahi noted that AV supply has grown the total ride-hailing category rather than cannibalizing it.

Uber currently facilitates AV trips in select markets through partnerships with Waymo (Alphabet), Waabi, Lucid Motors, and others. Khosrowshahi projected expansion to up to 15 cities globally by the end of 2026, including Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Munich, Hong Kong, Zurich, and Madrid—split between the U.S. and international markets. By 2029, he said, Uber intends to become “the largest facilitator of AV trips in the world.”

He tempered expectations, however, cautioning that autonomous vehicles “are likely to remain a very small portion of the rideshare category for many years to come” due to technological, regulatory, safety, and scaling hurdles. This tempered outlook may have contributed to the premarket share decline, as some investors had hoped for more aggressive near-term AV revenue guidance.

Guidance for the first quarter of 2026 called for gross bookings growth of at least 17% year-over-year, targeting a range of $52 billion to $53.5 billion. The company reiterated its long-term target of achieving profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis and generating strong free cash flow, though near-term margin pressures from AV investments and competitive dynamics remain in focus.

Uber’s results arrive during a pivotal transition for the ride-hailing industry. The rapid rollout of driverless services in urban markets—led by Waymo’s fully autonomous operations in San Francisco since 2024—has reshaped competitive landscapes. Uber’s strategy of partnering rather than owning AV fleets positions it as a platform aggregator, potentially mitigating capital intensity while capturing network effects.

Despite the revenue beat, premarket shares softened as investors weighed the AV narrative against near-term profitability concerns and broader market rotation away from growth stocks. The company’s ability to balance aggressive AV expansion with sustained delivery momentum and margin improvement will likely remain a key focus for analysts and shareholders in the months ahead.