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.
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“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.