Freshdesk Raises $5M in Series B Funding from Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners

Friday April 27, 2012 , 3 min Read

Freshdesk, the online help desk software solution, announced that it has raised $5 million in financing led by Tiger Global Management. Previous investor, Accel Partners, is also participating in the round.

Freshdesk closed its Series A funding in October last year. The company will be using the funds raised in this round to ramp up engineering and build more exciting product features. Freshdesk also plans to expand its global support team to meet the growing demand, and use the finance to help other growing businesses provide best-in-class support to their customers.

Freshdesk is a social customer service software that allows companies to support customers through both traditional support channels like email and phone, as well as social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

“We have been impressed by the Freshdesk team’s ability to identify what customers really want in their help desk, and quickly roll out these capabilities into the product. This additional capital will help Freshdesk reach a broader base of businesses big and small,” says Shekhar Kirani at Accel Partners.

Recently, the company announced a host of features like time-tracking, ability to add email commands and advanced reporting capabilities in the product.“With millions of customers voicing their opinions and complaints on Facebook and Twitter, social customer support is the new marketing. Today, the easiest way to build a powerful brand is to listen and engage with the customer”, says Freshdesk CEO, Girish Mathrubootham. “Businesses need an affordable solution to get closer to their customers and engage with them across mobile, social and traditional channels simultaneously. And our mission is to give them just that.”

YourStory spoke to Girish on this round of funding:

YS: What can we expect from Freshdesk in the coming months?

We started out building Freshdesk as a full service customer support software that can enable a company to listen and engage with

1. Customers talking to the company through traditional Channels - (Email, Phone, website portal etc.)

2. Customers talking to other customers - (Community Engagement, Idea sharing, Voting etc.)

3. Customers talking about the company on Social channels - Twitter, Facebook etc.

In the coming months we are going to work on transforming customer support from a boring and frustrating experience into a more interesting, engaging, fun and fulfilling experience for both the agents and customers.

YS: What has been the most exciting part of your entrepreneurial journey so far?

The entire journey so far has been terrific in terms of experience and excitement. Last year around this time, we were 6 people slogging it out in hot chennai, in a makeshift office, in a non-descript suburb of Chennai, we did not have a product released, no funding or meetings with VCs. 12 months is a very long time in the life of a startup. Now we have built a super awesome team of 25+ people, have customers in over 50 countries, have tripled our customer base last quarter and the most exciting thing that we experience daily is reading customer love emails. Our biggest achievement till date is that we have built a product that our users love. As long as we have their love, we are confident we will continue to grow and prosper.

Read YourStory's interview of Girish Mathrubootham here and watch his video interview here.

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