A file photo of Girish Mathrubootham, founder and chief executive, Freshdesk, who said that the acquisition of Framebench presents an opportunity to integrate collaborative capabilities. Photo: Mint
Bengaluru: Freshdesk Inc., a start-up that provides customer support platforms for enterprises, has acquired Framebench Technologies Pvt. Ltd, a company which lets users collaborate on files (documents, images, videos) in real time, to allow its support teams to better interact with customers.
This marks Freshdesk’s fourth acquisition in seven months. The five-year-old Chennai-based firm acquired Konotor, which helps businesses chat with their consumers inside apps, last December; Frilp, a social recommendation app in October; and 1CLICK.io, a video chat platform in August.
Traditionally, many product companies have boosted sales growth by making acquisitions in new areas. Like Freshdesk, Capillary Technologies Pvt. Ltd is also following the same strategy.
Capillary Tech, which makes customer support platforms for the retail sector, made its first big acquisition by buying MartJack, which makes technology for e-commerce platforms, last year.
With its acquisitions Freshdesk is looking to plug gaps in its product portfolio, and augment its offerings without having to build these technologies in-house.
Freshdesk has so far raised $95 million from venture capital firms Accel Partners, Google Capital and Tiger Global Management LLC.
With the help of Framebench, support agents, product teams, and customers can simultaneously work on a file and resolve issues without resorting to long email chains.
“Customer engagement is an opportunity which is a superb use case for visual collaboration. Being a heavy touchpoint business, a file viewing and annotation tool like Framebench makes perfect sense for agent-client and also agent-team collaboration. Framebench’s capabilities will be merged inside Freshdesk’s products,” said Rohit Agarwal, chief executive officer, Framebench.
Framebench, which claims to have worked with over a 1,000 companies including HBO, Unilever and Isentia, was initially envisioned as a tool for collaboration in the creative design industries, but morphed into a file viewing, annotation and approval platform.
Agarwal said that while Framebench’s existing customers can continue to use the product, they would not take any new users. Six of the Pune-based firm’s seven members have joined Freshdesk’s core product team.
“The acquisition of Framebench presents an opportunity to integrate collaborative capabilities not only into Freshdesk, but also other products like Freshservice (Freshdesk’s cloud-based service desk solution, which helps customers deliver their internal IT support),” said Girish Mathrubootham, founder and chief executive, Freshdesk, in a statement on Monday.
Freshdesk, which is one of India’s biggest product start-ups, has 50,000 customers globally, and competes with global heavyweights ZenDesk and Salesforce.com. The company is based in San Bruno, California, with offices in London, Sydney, and Chennai. In November, it hired former LinkedIn India managing director Nishant Rao as its chief operating officer.
[“source-Livemint”]