Freshdesk
Freshdesk Inc. is a cloud-based customer support software provider, headquartered in California. The company’s flagship product is Freshdesk, an issue tracking system that offers analytics for issues tracked.
History
The company was founded in October 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, sparked by a Hacker News comment on how the time was ripe for a disruptor in the customer support space. The product was officially launched in June 2011
Operations
Freshdesk Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco, with the development center in Chennai, India. As of December 2013, they have 275 employees in their Chennai division. Hosted on Amazon Web Services, Freshdesk is powered by Engine Yard.
Freshdesk partnered with Amazon’s Redshift in June 2013 to power their analytics and reporting solution FreshInsights.
Products and services
Freshdesk
Freshdesk’s SaaS help desk software enables companies to handle their customers’ problems across various channels. The application’s monitoring of social networks Facebook and Twitter for keywords allows businesses to gauge public perception of their brand and track industry trends. In August 2012, Freshdesk launched a HTML5-based mobile app. In a bid to make it easier for agents, a native app was released for the Android OS in December 2013
Freshdesk integrated game elements like quests and trophies in a bid to increase motivation among support agents in September 2012
In August 2013, Freshdesk’s released a new ‘In-Sync app’ for Facebook Pages to help businesses synchronize their support portals with the social network. Freshdesk has integrated their application with 30+ third party service providers SugarCRM, Salesforce, Dropbox to ensure businesses can continue using their independent billing services and relationship management software in tandem with Freshdesk’s support solution.
Freshservice
In January 2014, Freshdesk Inc. launched Freshservice, a cloud-based IT service desk.
Growth
In June 2011, the product won Microsoft BizSpark Startup challenge and was officially launched. In December 2011, six months after its launch, Freshdesk secured $1 Million in Series A funding from global venture capital firm, Accel Partners. In April 2012, with 700 customers, Freshdesk raised $5 million from Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners during a second round of funding. 1 year after launch in June 2012, Freshdesk crossed the 1000 customers milestone. In October 2013, 3 years after being founded, Freshdesk was serving 10,000 customers. In November 2013, Freshdesk announced that it had raised $7 million in a Series C round of funding with Accel Partners and Tiger Global . In June 2014 Freshdesk raises $31 million (Rs.183.55 crore) in series D funding from Tiger Global Management along with previous investor VC firm Accel Partners and Google Capital.
Controversies
In December 2011, Freshdesk was accused of being a ripoff of Zendesk by Ben Kepes, the noted blogger and cloud analyst. Ben Kepes, along with Mikkel Svane (CEO of Zendesk), alleged that Freshdesk was cashing in on Zendesk’s popularity. The chain of conversations eventually took a racial turn, referring to the founder’s country of origin as well as credibility in the market place.
Freshdesk responded by creating ripoffornot.org chronicling the conversation, and presented a comparison between the two product, inviting users as well as Ben Kepes to try the product and offer their critique.