Astro

Astro is the service of e-mail using artificial intelligence for display of the most important information in letters and the calendar. An AI system is applied to sorting of letters and reminders on the basis of the analysis of behavior of the user: for example, she suggests to archive the repeating messages which the user often ignores.

The startup also created the Astrobot tool allowing to browse messages of e-mail and data from the calendar directly in the Slack messenger. By the end of September, 2018 in Astro 28 people work, the office of the company is in Palo Alto.

History

2018: Slack purchased Astro

On September 24, 2018 Slack Technologies announced Astro purchase. This acquisition as writes the Quartz edition, became the largest for the corporate messenger, however the cost of the transaction does not reveal.

Under the terms of the agreement, all staff of Astro will pass into Slack, and applications for macOS, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa and Slack which are developed by the sold startup will be closed on October 10, 2018.

Interface of a mail service Astro

Slack buys Astro for integration of e-mail with the service as in the company consider that e-mail still remains the important tool for business communication.

Our purpose — to make so that it was simpler to commands to transfer correspondence there where it will be more productive … We took some steps for integration of e-mail into Slack, but now we can simplify this joint work and make it even more productive — said in Slack.

Slack and Astro are focused on corporate users to whom third-party services, like Salesforce.com which are used by the companies for interaction management with clients are already available. Salesforce.com and other services can be integrated from Slack, but often this integration is constructed on e-mail. Judging by the transaction with Astro, Slack wants to introduce the technologies in the messenger to make it even more managed.^[1]

Notes