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.