Freshdesk makes its 7th acquisition, nabs Pipemonk to strengthen its integration ecosystem

Freshdesk continues its acquisition spree. The SaaS-based company has acquired Pipemonk to create seamless integrations between business apps for heightened customer engagement.

For Freshdesk, it is only the calendar that has changed in 2017. Its stupendous growth and acquisition plans continue to accelerate. After raising a fresh $55 million funding, the cloud-based customer engagement software provider has announced its seventh acquisition in the last 16 months.

The SaaS-based company has acquired Pipemonk, the data integration platform that allows companies to synchronize and move data amongst multiple cloud apps quickly and easily. This acquisition is part of the overall strategy to create an ecosystem of interlinked Freshdesk and third-party products for businesses.

Pipemonk story

Pipemonk was formerly known as ZapStitch, and founded in 2014 by Satya Padmanabham and Ravi Madabhushi. Pipemonk is a Cloud Data Integration platform which enables small businesses to automate their data flow across cloud business solutions. It integrates multiple SaaS apps like e-commerce, accounting, CRM, marketing, helpdesk, and automate data transfer between them.

The platform makes the entire process quite simple and economical. The company had raised $2.1 million in funding from Helion and Orios Venture Partners. Pipemonk claims to serve more than 400 clients across the world.

Pipemonk @Freshdesk

At Freshdesk, the Pipemonk team will work on strengthening the integrations between the Freshdesk suite of products as well as expand third party integrations for each of the Freshdesk products. This will cut down the need for multiple logins, multiple amounts of data entry, and allow instant and seamless access to dynamic data across products.

Freshdesk's current offering (products) include:

1. Freshdesk - allows organisations to support customers through email, phone, websites, forums, and social media;
2. Freshservice - a cloud-based service desk and IT service management solution;
3. Hotline.io - an in-app support and engagement platform for mobile-first businesses;
4. Freshsales - a CRM solution and sales system for high-velocity sales teams.

Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO of Freshdesk, says,

The Pipemonk team will enhance Freshdesk's capabilities to integrate within our own products as well as external products. Having your apps talk to each other and enabling seamless flow of data plays an important role in any business today, and we at Freshdesk are focused on making that workflow process simple for our customers.

In a statement, Freshdesk mentioned that as more companies are interested in integrating with one or more Freshdesk products, the need to speed up the process was clear but it was also important to create a seamless flow of data.

In coming months, the Pipemonk team of 13 will focus on making existing integrations more robust as well as growing the options available to customers.

Freshdesk acquisitions

Freshdesk's earlier acquisitions are as follows:

1. Airwoot - platform offering customer service solution on social media in April 2016
2. Framebench - an online collaboration platform in February 2016
3. Konotor - Chennai-based messaging app in December 2015
4. Frilp - an online platform that helps users discover a shop or service through their friends and people in October 2015
5. 1CLICK - video, voice and text chat platform with collaborative features screen sharing and conversation recording in August 2015.
6. Chatimity - a social chat platform, that developed artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbot technology, in October 2016.

Backed by Accel, Tiger Global Management, CapitalG and Sequoia Capital India, Freshdesk has offices in US(California), UK, Australia and India. The company claims to have over 100,000 customers around the world.