A Swedish Lock Giant Just Bought August Home for Its Smart Locks

Assa Abloy now owns the San Francisco startup.

August Home has found someone who wants a lot of its pricey Internet-connected locks, but it’s not your typical homeowner.

Swedish business giant Assa Abloy, known for making popular door locks like the Yale lock, said Thursday that bought the San Francisco based August for an undisclosed amount.

Assa Abloy executive vice president Thanasis Molokotos said in a statement that the deal “strengthens our residential smart door strategy with complementary smart locks, expansion into video doorbells and comprehensive solutions for home delivery.”

For August, the deal symbolizes the end of its efforts as a Silicon Valley upstart aiming to disrupt bigger companies with its lineup of web-connected door locks that can be remote-controlled from a smartphone app.

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The company raised a total of $ 100 million since its 2012 founding, according to the deal-tracking service PitchBook.

August raised $ 25 million in July to help fund its recent launch of new, cheaper August Smart Lock Pro locks intended to make the high-tech gadgets more appealing to mainstream consumers, said August CEO Jason Johnson in September.

Now in the arms of a bigger company, August will get more direct help to sell its products to the masses, the tradeoff being that it loses its independence as a more nimble startup. The acquisition also highlights the challenges consumer hardware startups face creating big-hit products that result in big enough sales to help them compete with much larger businesses.

Johnson said in a statement that he is “committed to working with ASSA ABLOY to see the vision materialize over the next few years.”

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Slack locks down Oracle partnership targeting enterprises

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Slack Technologies Inc has secured a partnership with Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) to integrate the tech giant’s enterprise software products into the popular workplace messaging app, the two companies told Reuters.

The partnership is a victory for Slack as the young startup ramps up its efforts to win the business of large enterprises in an increasingly competitive marketplace that has seen the entry of Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), Facebook Inc (FB.O) and countless startups.

“As you see all these large enterprise software companies looking at messaging as a major platform, they’re looking to partner with us first and foremost,” said Brad Armstrong, Slack’s head of global business and corporate development.

The partnership will allow workers to use Slack as the interface for Oracle’s sales, human resources and business software.

Workers will be able to ask questions such as “how many vacation days do I have left this year?” and instantaneously receive a response from an Oracle chatbot, said Suhas Uliyar, Oracle vice president of bots, artificial intelligence and mobile.

“I call this the next browser,” Uliyar said. “This is just the natural way in how you converse.”

Slack entered the partnership to differentiate its messaging product among large corporations, a market the company has made a top priority since launching an enterprise-grade version of its messenger in January.

Slack is hoping the Oracle partnership will entice more corporations to choose its messenger over Microsoft Teams, Facebook Workplace and Atlassian Stride, all of which launched in the past year.

Oracle, meanwhile, said the partnership is key to serving younger professionals, many of which are accustomed to using messaging interfaces like Slack, Snapchat and Facebook Messenger.

“We need to make sure we’re embracing the way the world is changing and embracing the way that people are working,” Uliyar said.

The partnership between the two companies came about after Slack secured the tech giant as a customer. At Oracle, there are 30,000 workers who actively use Slack for work. Oracle is currently developing these chatbots, and they will begin to roll out to Slack and Oracle users within the next two quarters, Uliyar said.

Reporting by Salvador Rodriguez; Editing by Amrutha Gayathri

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