Freshdesk buys its fourth startup, adds collaboration to its list of weapons

Photo credit: Stock Monkeys.

Customer support startup Freshdesk has acquired Framebench, a cloud-based business that allows teams to share comments and other feedback on videos, images, and presentations. This allows Freshdesk agents to work more closely with its customers on files they have shared, as well as share these files with their own internal teams.

“Freshdesk is committed to helping companies provide great customer experiences, and collaboration plays a critical role in enabling businesses [to] stay on top of delivering customer happiness,” CEO and founder Girish Mathrubootham explained in a press release.

Framebench has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from a round that included Blume Ventures.

Big moves

Girish Mathrubootham, cofounder and CEO FreshDesk. Photo Credit: Ronald Heister PR.

This adds yet another layer to the services that the homegrown customer support startup offers.

Last year was a big year for Freshdesk. Software review site G2 Crowd ranked it as the number one help desk software in the world for customer satisfaction. After receiving US$50 million in series E money from existing investors Tiger Global, Accel Partners, and Google Capital, it completed four acquisitions.

The four all seem to follow the same strategy that Girish Mathrubootham presented to Tech in Asia in an earlier interview: “Customer support is also about engaging with the community, building your brand, going social, and so on,” he explained.

First, it acquired 1click in August 2015. It’s a live video chat and screen-sharing startup that gives Freshdesk employees the power to interact directly with customers. Coincidentally, 1click is also backed by Blume Ventures.

Then, in October, it acquired Frilp, an app that uses natural language processing technology to crowdsource information from online communities. This was important because it reduced the need for a Freshdesk agent to respond to each and every enquiry that a customer had.

Its third acquisition last year was chat app Konotor, introducing a feature that would let businesses talk to their own customers as well as Freshdesk’s agents.

Freshdesk is one of the few globally acclaimed startups to call India home, and has raised over US$95 million in funding over six rounds.

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