Cisco Investments joins Helpshift's Series B funding, taking the total amount to $38mn
Earlier in June, Pune and San Francisco-based CRM solution provider Helpshift had raised $23 million in Series B funding from Microsoft Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors like Intel Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, True Ventures and Visionnaire Ventures had also participated in the round. The team today announced that Cisco Investments joined this round as well, bringing the total amount of funding in the round to $38 million.
With this additional investment, Helpshift and Cisco will look at opportunities where Helpshift's in-app customer support solutions can be integrated with Cisco's contact centre solutions. The press release shared by the company said that the $350 billion contact centre industry is expected to take advantage of this new channel.
Prior to this round, the startup had raised $32 million in total. In 2014, it had raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Intel Capital, Visionnaire Ventures and existing investors. According to Abhinash Tripathy, Co-founder and CEO, Helpshift, the Series B funding will help them expand their team across R&D, sales and marketing.
Speaking on the investment, Rob Salvagno, Head of Cisco Investments and VP Cisco Corporate Development, said that they will continue to invest in strategic solutions that will aid the growth technology developments and help solve customer and partner challenges.
He added that they look forward to supporting Helpshift in enabling companies to provide best-in-class mobile customer care through their data-centric messaging platform.
Helpshift claims that it has been installed in more than 1.3 billion devices worldwide, serving more than 300 million customers monthly. The company’s clients include Zynga, VirginMedia, Microsoft, WesternUnion, Flipboard, Shyp, Luxe and WordPress.
Abhinash adds that apps have become the primary way consumers and employees are accessing products and services. He says that just like how customer service has moved away from phone to email, now, customer service is moving inside apps to avoid friction.
"With the additional funding from Cisco Investments, we are looking to help the entire contact centre industry transition from being reactive to proactive while driving higher customer satisfaction and lowering cost," says Abhinash.
Founded by Baishampayan Ghose and Abinash in 2012, Helpshift is a mobile-focused SaaS platform that works as an embedded support desk for apps. The platform integrates with mobile apps and helps developers capture all user-generated information, thereby making it easier and effective for them to solve problems.
Flipboard says that with Helpshift, they are able to provide a rather robust and proactive support experience to their 80 million monthly users.
A recent survey conducted by NASSCOM stated that the SMB market is expected to grow at a rate of 15 percent annualy. With such growth, the IT spends of such companies are expected to grow further, with CRM platforms as their top priority.
The helpdesk market is fast growing, and several other players like Desk.com, Zendesk, Freshdesk, TeamSupport, LiveAgent and Kayako, to name a few, are staking claim to the market. With the growth of smartphones and apps, mobile-based customer support has become extremely relevant.
Freshdesk is one of the larger customer support service startups, and had raised $50 million in risk capital in 2015. In December, the Chennai-based company acquired mobile user engagement platform Konotor, which offers user engagement over message and in-app.