Helpshift raises $23m in fresh funding, talks bot-powered customer support

L-R : Abinash Tripathy and Baishampayan Ghose of Helpshift. Photo credit: Helpshift.

In-app customer support platform Helpshift raised US$23 million in a fresh round of funding, the company said on Tuesday.

The funding round brought in new investors Microsoft Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors including Intel Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, True Ventures, and Visionnaire Ventures took part in the new round, bringing the company’s total capital raised to US$36.2 million, Helpshift said in a statement.

Helpshift is a SaaS-based platform that works as a support desk for mobile apps. The platform integrates with mobile apps and helps developers gather customer information. It also creates chat support to help companies do away with email and phone support on their apps.

“We count many big companies as clients including Honeywell, Adobe, Zynga, and Flipboard, and the conversation is moving towards chat support for many others,” chief executive officer and co-founder Abinash Tripathy told Tech in Asia in an interview in Bangalore.

The new financing will help expansion across teams in research and development, sales and marketing, he said.

Through its clients’ apps, Helpshift is currently on about 1.3 billion devices worldwide and plans to take that number to two billion devices this year.

The idea is also to harness the power of immense amounts of customer data the company collates.

“There is an exciting world ahead of us where customers can proactively receive help even before they face a problem through predictive machine learning, customers can chat with intelligent bots to receive timely help,” added Abinash.

“This new round of funding enables us to take what we started to the next level – the world of autonomous customer support.”