Slashwork founders, Jackson Gabbard, Dave Miller, and Josh Watzman.
Courtesy: Slashwork
Two years after Meta announced it was shuttering its Workplace enterprise business, a band of former engineers at the social media company is launching a new corporate communication platform.
Slashwork, as the startup is called, on Wednesday announced that it has raised $3.5 million in funding from a variety of investors including Slack co-founder Cal Henderson and Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, the venture capital firm of former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg.
The London startup was co-founded by Jackson Gabbard, David Miller and Josh Watzman. The former Facebook engineers said they are designing Slashwork to be an enterprise communication platform similar to Salesforce’s Slack and Microsoft Teams but driven by artificial intelligence.
“We’ve started from there, and then we’ve said ‘What about the 2026 AI era?'” Gabbard, the CEO, 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 told CNBC that every piece of content in Slashwork has a large-language model embedding, which allows for robust searches from users. Users can also command AI agents to help them find posts or images that aren’t populating.
Sheryl Sandberg, former chief operating officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Facebook Workplace launched in 2016 as a business communication tool that looked like the company’s social network but was designed for enterprise customers to connect their employees. Meta announced it was ending the platform in 2024 to focus efforts on the Metaverse and AI investments.
Besides Sandberg, Slashwork received funding from other Facebook veterans, including former revenue chief David Fischer, former ads chief Carolyn Everson and former sales leader AJ Tennant, who was also one of Slack’s first sales leaders.
Tennant is a key investor for Slashwork. He told CNBC that building AI into its software is a unique advantage for Slashwork.
“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.
Julien Codorniou, who led Facebook Workplace from its launch to 11 million paid subscribers, is also a Slashwork board member and has overseen the company’s incubation.
“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.”
Slashwork is launching with smaller tech-focused companies before a wider rollout later this year. Gabbard told CNBC that Slashwork plans to keep the team small, with the money going toward design and product iteration.