Freshdesk acquires Frilp to crowdsource customer support

India’s Frilp, an app for users to crowdsource tips and advice, today announced its acquisition by helpdesk software company Freshdesk. The deal size remains undisclosed.

Freshdesk is a customer service provider to companies around the world like Honda, Unicef, and Toshiba. Its tools provide support across multiple channels, including phone, email, chat, website, social networks, and mobile apps. Frilp, on the other hand, helps you find recommendations on businesses, shops, and services from friends as well as wider circles.

With this acquisition, Freshdesk gets natural language processing technology from Frilp. The startup will help Freshdesk look for knowledgeable people from online customer forums and communities to support customer inquiries. For instance, Freshdesk can connect customers who have service desk inquiries with their friends on social networks who might be able to solve their problems. It will also be able to route customer service inquiries to agents who are experts in the customer’s area of concern.

The idea is to reduce the need for hiring customer service reps to answer the ever increasing customer service queries.

Frilp co-founder Senthil Kanthaswamy shared the news of the acquisition on Facebook.

Frilp had earlier raised US$500,000 funding from angel investors, including Freshdesk founder Girish Mathrubootham. The three-year-old company was incubated at Microsoft Ventures. The Frilp app for Android will shut down soon.

Freshdesk is one of India’s most-funded startups, having secured US$50 million in series C from investors like Tiger Global and Google Capital. It has 50,000 customers in 145 countries.

Less than two months ago, Freshdesk bought 1Click, a live video chat service. Frilp was the firm’s second acquisition.