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 CNBC. "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.
The technical architecture sets Slashwork apart from incumbents like Salesforce's Slack and Microsoft Teams. Every piece of content in the platform has a large-language model embedding, enabling what Gabbard describes as robust semantic search capabilities. Users can also deploy AI agents to surface posts or images that traditional keyword searches might miss. It's a fundamentally different approach than bolting AI features onto decade-old platforms.
Julien Codorniou, who led Facebook Workplace from launch to its 11 million subscriber peak, sits on Slashwork's board and oversaw the company's incubation. His perspective cuts to the heart of why this moment matters. "The current generation of tools, Slack, Teams, Zoom—which are all 10 years old, pre-AI—were optimized for people talking to people," Codorniou said. "With AI we can also have people talking to systems, and that amplifies the potential for communication."
The funding syndicate reads like a Facebook reunion with a specific focus. Besides Sandberg, the round includes former revenue chief David Fischer, former ads chief Carolyn Everson, and former sales leader AJ Tennant, who was also among Slack's earliest sales hires. Tennant brings a unique dual perspective on both building and selling enterprise communication platforms at scale.
"Having AI agents that support you in getting your work done, combined with the communication, is going to bridge a lot of gaps that I think exist in enterprise," Tennant told CNBC. That vision goes beyond simple chatbots—Slashwork is positioning AI as the connective tissue between human conversations and automated workflows, a capability that legacy platforms are retrofitting rather than building natively.
The competitive landscape is brutal. Slack dominates with tens of millions of daily active users across its free and paid tiers, while Microsoft Teams leverages Office 365 bundling to reach over 320 million monthly users. Both have rushed to integrate AI features over the past year, with Slack adding Einstein AI and Teams embedding Copilot. But Slashwork is betting that native AI design will trump incremental updates to aging architectures.
The go-to-market strategy is cautious and deliberate. Slashwork is launching first with smaller tech-focused companies before pursuing a wider rollout later this year. Gabbard told CNBC the team plans to stay small, channeling the $3.5 million toward design and product iteration rather than aggressive hiring. It's a measured approach that prioritizes product-market fit over rapid scaling—a lesson learned from watching countless enterprise startups stumble.
Meta's decision to shutter Workplace in 2024 opened the door for this moment. The company cited its pivot toward Metaverse investments and AI development as reasons to exit the enterprise communication business, even as Workplace generated steady subscription revenue. For the former Workplace team, that strategic retreat created an opportunity to rebuild the concept without corporate constraints.
The timing aligns with broader enterprise software trends. Companies are increasingly scrutinizing their tech stacks, questioning whether existing tools are AI-ready or just AI-washed. Gartner reported that 63% of enterprise leaders plan to evaluate new communication platforms in 2026, with AI capabilities ranking as the top decision criterion. Slashwork is positioning itself to capture that evaluation cycle.
What remains to be seen is whether a well-funded startup with impressive pedigree can dislodge entrenched incumbents. Slack and Teams benefit from massive network effects, deep integrations with thousands of business tools, and enterprise sales relationships built over a decade. Slashwork will need to prove its AI-native architecture delivers tangible productivity gains, not just novel features. The $3.5 million provides runway to make that case, but the real test comes when larger enterprises start their evaluations.
Slashwork's launch represents more than just another enterprise software startup—it's a referendum on whether AI can genuinely reimagine workplace communication or if it's just another feature layer on existing platforms. The Meta veterans backing this bet clearly believe the former, and they're putting their reputations behind a team that already built one successful enterprise platform. Whether AI-native architecture proves compelling enough to pry customers away from Slack and Teams will define not just Slashwork's trajectory, but whether this generation of AI-first workplace tools can break through or fade into the crowded enterprise graveyard.
