Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg just backed the very kind of startup her old employer walked away from two years ago. Slashwork, an AI-powered workplace communications platform built by ex-Facebook engineers, announced Wednesday it's raised $3.5 million from a roster of Meta veterans including Sandberg, former revenue chief David Fischer, and Julien Codorniou, who led Facebook Workplace to 11 million paid subscribers before Meta shut it down in 2024. The investment signals a calculated bet that enterprise communication tools need an AI-first rebuild to stay relevant.
The enterprise communications market just got more crowded, and the timing couldn't be more pointed. Slashwork, a London-based startup built by former Facebook engineers, emerged Wednesday with $3.5 million in funding from an all-star lineup of Meta alumni who know the space intimately. Leading the investment round is Sheryl Sandberg's Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, alongside Slack co-founder Cal Henderson and a who's-who of former Facebook executives including David Fischer, Carolyn Everson, and AJ Tennant.
The irony is hard to miss. Just two years ago, Meta pulled the plug on Facebook Workplace, the enterprise communication platform that launched in 2016 and eventually reached 11 million paid subscribers. Meta decided to redirect resources toward the Metaverse and AI investments, shuttering Workplace in 2024 despite its steady growth. Now the very executives who built that platform are betting on a spiritual successor that's designed from scratch for the AI era.
"We've started from there, and then we've said 'What about the 2026 AI era?'" CEO Jackson Gabbard told . "What does it look like whenever you start rethinking all of that from the ground up, with AI built into every place that it makes sense?" Gabbard co-founded Slashwork with fellow former Facebook engineers David Miller and Josh Watzman, bringing deep expertise in building communication tools at scale.
