Five acquisitions in a short span of twelve months. Girish Mathrubootham, the founder and CEO of Chennai-based startup Freshdesk, believes that there is always something exciting happening around the corner. For Girish Mathrubootham, acquisitions happen in a brisk phase. And most of the buyouts were meant to add value to the services provided to the customers by businesses.
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support platform that was founded with the mission of enabling companies of all sizes to provide customer service. This Chennai-based startup, often referred as a prospective unicorn, recently announced its fifth acquisition—a smart social customer support tool, Airwoot.
Girish Mathrubootham tells FE: “The world of customer support is undergoing a paradigm shift and consumer behaviour is changing. Customers are moving more and more towards conversational channels such as social and chat as compared to traditional channels like phone and email. Technology must keep evolving to adapt to this continuous change in behaviour. With these acquisitions, Freshdesk will enable businesses to provide customer support effectively across all channels.”
Airwoot was founded in 2012 by a team of PhD dropouts led by Saurabh Arora. The startup raised investment from Kae Capital in 2013. Top angel investors Rajan Anandan, Sasha Mirchandani, Sunil Kalra and Samir Sood also participated in the round. At Freshdesk, the Airwoot team will be focused on enhancing the company’s current social media offerings.
“Over the last few months, we announced four acquisitions—1CLICK, Frilp, Konotor and Framebench. Each of these teams have settled into Freshdesk and become a part of our family. They have been steadily building and shipping out awesome new features. We pulled off a great product launch with Hotline last month. I am happy to welcome the Airwoot team to our Chennai office and help us deliver customer happiness like we envisioned it right from the day we started,” says Girish Mathrubootham in his blog.
Girish Mathrubootham established Freshdesk in 2010. When started, one of the primary focus areas of the company was on social media support and how it could empower brands to provide stellar support to their customers. With the social media integrations within Freshdesk, it could allow businesses to monitor posts that were relevant to them. Freshdesk then focused on building a ticketing system which would help support teams keep track of customer issues reported on social media.
What the company soon realised was that most brands found it difficult to set up these filters and rules. Since the social media space has been continually evolving, the language on it does too. These filters and rules needed constant manual updates, which was not easy for most teams. According to Girish Mathrubootham, Airwoot’s artificial intelligence technology has been instrumental in helping brands do this effortlessly. Harnessing the power of machine learning, Airwoot filters out the noise and marketing chatter from your social handles and allows you to respond to customer queries, then and there.
As a pioneer of social desk, Freshdesk already offers one of the most powerful social engagement platforms available in the market. Airwoot uses machine learning to automate the process of identifying conversations on social media that require immediate attention, such as queries , grievances and incidents. Delivering customer support via social media continues to be a challenge for many companies given the high volume of noise in the medium. Airwoot’s technology provides us a powerful platform to power the social engagement centres of the future,” says Girish Mathrubootham.
Freshdesk had acquired social recommendation platform Frilp in October last year. Frilp connects users with each other and allows them to recommend products and services. With this acquisition, Freshdsek had gained a peer-to-peer communication platform and recommendation engine which will enable customers to reach out to businesses and other customers. Girish Mathrubootham says, “The customer service landscape and overall needs of our customers are rapidly changing as they integrate social and mobile support capabilities into their customer programmes.”
This was Freshdesk’s second acquisition. It had acquired 1CLICK to deepen its support capabilities through video chat and co-browsing technology just a few months earlier. The Frilip acquisition announcement came in the heels of Freshdesk passing the 50,000 customer mark and doubling the customer base over the past year. Currently, Freshdesk has 70,000 customers around the world.
Girish Mathrubootham, who was instrumental in developing four helpdesks for Zoho, returned to India after his stint in US in the year 2009. In the process of transition, his television set got damaged and he did not get an insurance reimbursement even after putting in a lot of efforts. Upset, he posted his bitter experience in an online forum where the expatriates from US look for support to shift to India and immediately he got a response from a logistics firm and his complaint was closed within a day.
Encouraged by the response online social forum, Girish Mathrubootham started a new company called Freshdesk. “The idea for our flagship product was the result of a bad customer experience, thanks to a broken TV. The founders saw a need for a better customer support solution that could help provide better customer experience, and also scale as companies grow. So they started building one. Six months later, in June 2011, Freshdesk won the Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge and one hundred days after that we celebrated our 100th customer,” Freshdesk says on its website.
Freshdesk has so far received a total equity funding of $ 94 million in 5 rounds from 3 investors such as Tiger Global Management, Accel and Google Capital. The company has offices in San Bruno, Chennai, London and Sydney. The products include Freshdesk (June 2011), Freshservice (January 2014) and Hotline (February 2016). Freshdesk recently launched a new product called Hotline which was a merger between Freshdesk’s Mobihelp and its
acquired product, Konotor.
