Founders of Slashwork, Jackson Gabbard, Dave Miller and Josh Watzman.
Courtesy: Slashwork
Two years later Meta announced that it was closing its Workplace company, a group of former social media company engineers are launching a new business communications platform.
Sliced workas the startup is called, announced Wednesday that it had raised $3.5 million from various investors, including Slack co-founder Cal Henderson and Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, the venture capital firm of Meta’s former COO. Sheryl Sandberg.
The London-based startup was co-founded by Jackson Gabbard, David Miller and Josh Watzman. Former Facebook engineers said they designed Slashwork as a business communications platform similar to from Salesforce Slack and Microsoft Teams but carried by artificial intelligence.
“We started from there and then we asked, ‘What about the AI era in 2026?'” Gabbard, the CEO, told CNBC. “What does that look like when you start to rethink this from the ground up, with AI integrated everywhere it makes sense?”
Gabbard told CNBC that every piece of content in Slashwork incorporates a large language model, which allows for robust searches from users. Users can also command AI agents to help them find posts or images that are not being served.
Sheryl Sandberg, former chief operating officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during an interview with Bloomberg Television in San Francisco, California, United States, Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Facebook Workplace launched in 2016 as a business communications tool that resembled the company’s social network but was designed to allow corporate clients to connect their employees. Meta announced the end of the platform in 2024 concentrate efforts on Metaverse and investments in AI.
Besides Sandberg, Slashwork has received funding from other Facebook veterans, including former revenue head David Fischer, former advertising head Carolyn Everson, and former sales head AJ Tennant, who was also one of Slack’s first sales heads.
Tennant is a key investor in Slashwork. He told CNBC that integrating AI into its software is a unique advantage for Slashwork.
“Having AI agents that help you do your job, combined with communication, is going to fill a lot of gaps that I think exist in the enterprise,” Tennant told CNBC.
Julien Codorniou, who directed Facebook Workplace from launch to 11 million paying subscribers, is also a board member of Slashwork and oversaw the company’s incubation with a venture capital firm 20VC.
“The current generation of tools, Slack, Teams, Zoom – all of which are 10 years old, before AI – have been optimized for people talking to people,” Codorniou said. “Thanks to AI, people can also communicate with systems, which amplifies the potential for communication.”
Slashwork is launching to small, tech-focused businesses ahead of a wider rollout later this year. Gabbard told CNBC that Slashwork plans to keep the team small, with the money going toward product design and iteration.
