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Freshdesk, the Indian SaaS startup that provides a cloud-based customer support software has acquired Chatimity, a social chat platform that develops artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbot technology.
This is the sixth acquisition by Freshdesk in just over a year. The acquired technology will help Freshdesk scale chat infrastructure and build next gen chat products.
The Chatimity team, is now part of Freshdesk, and has started to create a scalable customer engagement chat platform.
Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshdesk said “People want a fast, personalised response. Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service but scaling that infrastructure continues to be a challenge.”
Bengaluru-based Chatimity was founded in 2011 by ex-Googlers, Tarkeshwar Thakur and Aravind Murthy. It was built to enable user interactions and improve engagement for users.
Chatimity’s multipurpose AI-based bot, MITI, uses a combination of NLP (Natural Language Processing), state machines and AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) to hold conversations across thousands of users in real-time.
The team has prototyped interactive bots including one for a popular travel website.
Tarkeshwar Thakur, co-founder and CEO of Chatimity said, “Our team was able to get a glimpse of what Freshdesk was already working on and we immediately knew that our team and technology would complement and accelerate product development at Freshdesk with a strong focus on AI and chat tech. Delivering a top-notch customer experience over chat continues to be a challenge for many companies, a problem we intend to solve with some of the next-gen chat products we are building at Freshdesk.”
In April 2016, Freshdesk acquired Airwoot – a startup that uses machine learning to help brands deliver quick customer service on social media. The company also opened a new regional office in Berlin, Germany in May this year.
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