Slack adds French, German and Spanish for overseas users of chat app

Workplace chat service Slack Technologies Inc. is used in more than 100 countries, but until now, it’s only been available in English. The San Francisco-based startup said Tuesday that its software, which lets teams send messages and collaborate on projects, will now be available in French, German and Spanish, with Japanese coming later this year.

The highest number of Slack’s users are in the U.S., followed by the U.K., Japan and Germany, Chief Executive Officer Stewart Butterfield said. Fifty-five percent of its weekly active users are outside of the U.S., mostly in Europe and Asia.

Microsoft Corp. offers support for Teams, the product it built to compete with Slack, in 20 languages. Atlassian Corp.’s HipChat service is designed primarily for English, but offers users the option to communicate in a language of choice.

Slack said its language support covers every part of the user experience from customer help to emoji names. Slack also debuted shared channels, which allow users in two different paid Slack teams to create a specific channel for collaborating with people outside the company such as vendors and consultants.

Slack now has more than 9 million weekly active users and 6 million daily active users. More than 2 million people pay to use the service on more than 50,000 paid teams, and the company said in June it had $200 million in revenue from subscriptions. About a year ago, the company had 4 million daily active users and had more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue.