Freshdesk buys Chatimity

Customer support software maker Freshdesk Inc. one of India’s most well-funded product start-ups had acquired Bengaluru based chat-bot firm Chatimity to augment its product offerings. Chatimity is the sixth in a series of small companies Freshdesk has acquired and the second in the chat space. In December last year, Freshdesk acquired Konotor, which helped businesses chat with their customers within apps.

Freshdesk acquired Airwoot, a social customer support platform in April, Framebench, a file collaboration platform in February, Frilp, a social recommendation app in October, and 1Click, a video chat platform in August. Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service but scaling that infrastructure continues to be a challenge.

Scaling quality customer support along with a rapidly expanding user base is a challenge that most internet-based firms face. With Chatimity’s bot, MITI, this can be used to converse with thousands of users in real time, Freshdesk hopes to help companies solve this problem. Although bots have been around for a while in one form or the other, advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have made chat-bots - bots that can emulate human conversations more accessible and popular than ever, with several companies such as Facebook and Slack opening up their platforms for chat-bots builders.

Freshdesk, which has so far raised $95 million from venture capital firms Accel Partners, Google Capital and Tiger Global Management LLC, has 50,000 customers globally, and competes with Helpshift, and global heavyweights ZenDesk and Salesforce.com. The company is based in San Bruno, California, with offices in London, Sydney and Chennai.