Line is building a Slack rival

Line, one of the world’s biggest chat apps with just over 200 million active users, is working on a workplace messaging app kinda like Slack, the company said today. It’ll be out in Japan in the spring.



To speed up the development, Line has tapped a team called Works Mobile that, just like Line Corp itself, is a Japan-based offshoot of the Korean web giant Naver. Works Mobile came out with its own team messaging app at the start of the year.

There are a ton of enterprise-oriented apps out there – including Facebook’s Workplace, which came out last week – but with businesses having such a diverse range of needs, there’s scope to support a crowded, pluralistic market.



The news comes as Line’s messaging app is struggling up against the might of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, plus newcomers like Snapchat. Valued at US$9.4 billion after its recent IPO, Line added only 10 million monthly active users last year while Facebook’s steamrolling duo welcomed in hundreds of millions of newcomers.

This article originally appeared on Tech in Asia.