Freshworks acquires Natero

Customer engagement service Freshworks which you may still remember under its old name of Freshdesk, has acquired Natero, a customer success service with some AI/ML smarts that helps businesses prevent churn and manage their customers.

The acquisition will help the company complete its mission to provide its users with a 360-degree view of their customers. Freshdesk started out with a focus on customer support and then added additional functionality for marketers and other roles over time. Today, however, companies want this full 360-degree view of a customer and are able to offer differentiated service to their top customers, for example. In many ways, the acquisition of Natero closes the loop here.

Natero will continue to exist as a stand-alone product, but it will also become part of the Freshworks 360 suite, Freshwork’s integrated customer engagement suite. Ahead of today’s acquisition, Natero had raised a total of $3.3 million. That’s not a lot for a startup that launched back in 2012, but Soules noted how he was able to fund the company’s expansion through revenue. The two companies did not disclose the acquisition price.

Freshworks acquires Zarget

Enterprise software firm Freshworks Inc., previously Freshdesk, had acquired Zarget, a website analytics start-up backed by marquee Investors including Sequoia Capital. This marks the ninth acquisition for Freshworks in less than three years. It had acqui-hired chatbot start-up Joe Hukum, data integration platform Pipemonk and social media customer service firm Airwoot, among others.

Founded in 2015, Zarget offers tools to businesses and marketers to understand user behaviour on websites. According to the company, its suite of solutions—which include a click map of visitors, tests to determine the webpages that are doing better and other patented tools deployed through Google Chrome extensions—deliver actionable insights to increase user engagement.

Zarget was started by former Zoho executives Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santosh Kumar and is based in Chennai. The start-up received a seed investment from Freshworks’ Mathrubootham and went on to raise $7.5 million over two rounds from Accel Partners, Matrix Partners India and Sequoia Capital India.

Zarget was built to help marketers make informed decisions on their online properties without the need for deep technical resources or large budgets. Together with Freshworks, Zarget expect to accelerate the digital marketing evolution and help our customers further transform the way they market with combined expertise and solutions.

Freshdesk acquired Pipemonk

Freshdesk, a cloud based customer service software provider, acquired Pipemonk, a data integration platform that works on the software as-a-service model and allows companies to synchronize and move data among multiple cloud apps quickly and easily. For Freshdesk, the Bengaluru based company is the seventh acquisition in 16 months.

Pipemonk serves more than 400 clients globally. Pipemonk cloud based data Integration platform enables small businesses to automate their data flow across cloud business solutions. When organizations move their current applications to cloud, they often face issues of data getting fragmentation across applications. Pipemonk's solution helps a smooth transition of apps over cloud. 

At Freshdesk, the Pipemonk team will work on strengthening integrations between the Freshdesk suites of products as well as expand third party integrations for each of the Freshdesk products, thus cutting down the need for multiple logins, multiple amounts of data entry, and allowing instant and seamless access to dynamic data across products.

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.

Freshdesk buys start-up Airwoot

Customer support software maker Freshdesk Inc. has acquired Airwoot, which help companies spot customer queries and complaints on social media that require urgent attention. Customer support on social channels is key for digital businesses and using platforms like Airwoot enables them to predict conversations that may go viral and take action.

Delivering customer support via Social media continues to be a challenge for many companies given the high volume of noise in the medium. Airwoot AI technology provides a powerful platform to power the social engagement centres of the future. Airwoot used by firms such as Snapdeal, Xiaomi Corp., Ola, Paytm, Grofers, Jet Airways, MakeMyTrip and Cleartrip.com will continue as a standalone product.

For Freshdesk, one of India’s most well-funded product start-ups, Airwoot from Memeticlabs Technologies Pvt. Ltd is the fifth acquisition in nine months. Last April, Freshdesk raised $50 Million from investors Tiger Global Management, Accel Partners and Google Capital, bringing its total funding to $90 Million. The company has been successfully integrating start-ups it bought, into its own product portfolio.

In February, Freshdesk rolled out a new product, Hotline.io, its third since its launch in 2011. Hotline.io was built on the back of its December acquisition of Konotor, which helps businesses chat with their consumer inside apps. Previously, Freshdesk has acquired Framebench, a file collaboration platform in February, Frilp, a social recommendation app in October and 1CLICK.io, a video chat platform in August.

Freshdesk acquires Framebench

Cloud based customer support software firm Freshdesk has acquired Pune based Framebench, an online multimedia file collaboration platform, for an undisclosed amount. This is the fourth acquisition by Freshdesk, starting from the first acquisition of live video chat firm 1CLICK.io in August 2015.

Framebench offers an online platform that enables teams to share, review and comment on videos, images, presentations and documents. With the acquisition of Framebench, support agents can interact with their customers and internal product teams by collaborating on the same file. Framebench, launched in 2013, is funded by Blume ventures and has offered its services to the US Republican Party in its election campaign.

With Framebench, the customer support agent can interact with the product team even as the customer sends a screenshot and use the visual communication platform in realtime while working on knowledge base articles, images or even tutorial videos. This would enable multiple individuals to edit, annotate and review creative files.

Launched in 2010, Freshdesk has 50,000 customers around the world, including 3M, Honda, Hugo Boss, University of Pennsylvania, the Atlantic, and Petronas. The flagship product allows organizations to support customers through email, phone, websites, mobile apps, forums and social media.

Freshdesk acquires Frilp

Chennai based online customer service provider Freshdesk has acquired Frilp, a social recommendation app for exchanging references and recommendations. Frilp brings users contacts on social networks, phonebook and office network at one place, and helps them find services and businesses recommended by the contacts.

The acquisition will help Freshdesk leverage the technology of Frilp and enable customers to connect with friends on social networks who might provide solutions. This can also bring down the burden on companies customer service teams. Earlier, Freshdesk had acquired 1click, video chat software for an undisclosed amount to provide real time video chat based customer support to its clients.

Frilp was founded in 2012 and has raised $500,000 in funding from angel investors. In six rounds of funding, Freshdesk has so far raised $94 Million from Tiger Global, Google Capital and Accel Partners. Freshdesk competes with Salesforce and Zendesk.