Taskade, a Slack rival, just got another $5M in funding

Taskade, the Y Combinator-incubated, web-based collaboration tool for tasks shared by coworkers or teams, just raised a $5 million Series A round of funding.

In a post on Medium, Taskade founders Eli Simchon and Razi Haidar show they’ve grown from the small team of two living in their shared living room to over 40 people who work on an average day from their desks. They hope the cash will help them bring the company to the next level.

There are already a handful of teams and enterprise giants integrating Taskade, something the two founders told TechCrunch that they look to exploit as they evolve the product. “There are a ton of companies integrating with our platform, including Salesforce, PayPal, Panera, Zendesk, Yahoo (Postini) and Atlassian,” Simchon wrote.

The startup’s Slack-like tool works with teams spread out across the world and has the ability to launch custom Slack Channels with administrators who can adjust its color coding. Taskade keeps users connected with a central user screen that shows a timeline showing and synchronized jobs among teams.

To launch these conversations, admins can set up custom timelines including charts like tasks that have just been checked off and were assigned, or team chats that go back much further in time with files, voice or video messages. One of the key differentiators for Taskade is that it does not have those default project history functions — which can be really annoying and frustrating if you’re tasked with doing a top secret project that you feel you can’t delete or you’re working on something on paper and that has been saved to file.

With this time logging, admins can set expectations for users so that when one person checks off something, all other individuals can also do so. They can also set default work areas and create different ones if they find someone also working on something else.

Taskade is available for free, although the co-founders say that they are working on premium features for individuals that may make it more appealing than the free version. While they have not announced a release date for that premium feature, it’s currently available to test.

The startup has raised $4.8 million in seed funding, including from the likes of Seesmic co-founder Loic Le Meur and RREE Ventures. Their investment went to the two co-founders rather than an employee or pitch deck given that the founders originally launched the service before starting their new jobs.

Taskade offers free plans but starts charging enterprise users at $250 a month for managing multiple user accounts, then $250/month for every user on that account.

Taskade is part of Y Combinator’s winter batch, which sent members into Mountain View on January 19 of this year and starts getting its work done in September.