Freshdesk Acquires Konotor To Level Up In-App Customer Support

Tiger Global-backed Freshdesk has acquired Chennai-based in-app customer support startup Konotor for an undisclosed amount.

Konotor helps businesses engage with their clients/customers through features like two-way messaging, in-app support and marketing automation. The platform supports more than 40 Mn users through the apps it works with.

The acquisition would help the Freshdesk to serve an increasing number of mobile first businesses and to enhance its support channels and mobile solutions.

“Mobile-first companies face a unique set of challenges in customer support and user engagement, creating the need for a different solution. Konotor has demonstrated significant early success in addressing this need, by enabling marquee apps to engage better with their users. The addition of Konotor to our product suite will help us create powerful customer experiences,” Girish Mathrubootham, founder and chief executive, Freshdesk, said.

Konotor was founded in 2012 by Srikrishnan Ganesan, Deepak Balasubramanyam and Vignesh Girishankar. The founders have previously worked with companies like Verizon, eBay, and Zynga. Currently working with team of 9, Konotor counts Zomato, Times Internet among its clients.

In May 2014, the startup had raised $125K (INR 73 lakh) in funding from Qualcomm Ventures and Accel Partners. It had also won Qualcomm’s QPrize 2014 India edition. Post acquisition, Konotor will continue to operate independently and serve its existing customers.

This is third acquisition for Freshdesk for the year. In October, Freshdesk acquired social recommendation platform Frilp and in August, it acquired SaaS-based customer support startup 1Click.io.

Headquartered in the US, Freshdesk, was founded in 2010. It competes with other enterprise companies including Salesforce, Zendesk, Atlassian and others. It has more than 50K customers of which 25K customers were added in last 12 months (As of October 2015) and has raised around $94 Mn in funding so far. It counts Accel Partners, Tiger Global Management and Google Capital as its investors.

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