Freshdesk Attracts another $31M in Series D Funding

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I do not typically write about IPOs, or funding or things of this nature. But, this is interesting for a number of reasons,, in a space I do watch carefully. Yes, Freshdesk has 23,000 customers,  10,000 in the past two quarters, across 175 countries, what is fascinating is that they made it to this point with a very small team in the US, and no team on the ground (as far as I know) in 160+ of the 175 countries (I need to verify this, and will) even then the team in the US is new. If you want to see more press worthy coverage, TechCrunch covered the news this morning as well.

Another interesting tidbit is who participated in the round of funding; Google Capital and a strong show of support from the current investors, as the current round was actually led by Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners. But, Google Capital makes different kinds of investments – late stages than Google Ventures, the two should not be confused. taken from their own blog, a few short months ago:

Like our colleagues at Google Ventures, our goal is to invest in the most promising companies of tomorrow, with one important difference. While Google Ventures focuses mainly on early-stage investments, we’ll be looking to invest in companies solely as they hit their growth phase. That means finding companies that have already built a solid foundation and are really ready to expand their business in big ways. We’ll look across a range of industries for companies with new technologies and proven track records in their fields. Our investments to date include SurveyMonkey, Lending Club and Renaissance Learning—with many more to come.

Then there is the space, customer service, support, and helping to manage customer expectations. We need (the greater we) the ability to provide businesses strong capabilities to be agile and adapt to the needs of the customers. Zendesk went public, SugarCRM is knocking on the door and many others have been scooped up by larger companies, RightNow, Desk, just to name but a couple. Is this about subscriptions,  customer service and support or something different? In the end, (having just come from the SDL Innovate Conference), companies need a holistic view of the customer, from as many angles as possible and it must not require the moving of mountains to allow these system to speak to each other. 

Freshdesk is aligning itself will to attach this space.  What will they attack first? Going up market with more seats, investing in their sister products (FreshService)?  Will more integrations with sales and marketing systems be built (hint: I think they should) With this funding in place, watch-out for good things to come, best of luck to them!

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Mitch Lieberman
Finding patterns and connecting the dots across the enterprise. Holding a strong belief that success is achieved by creating tight alignment between business strategy, stakeholder goals, and customer needs. systems need to be intelligent and course through enterprise systems. Moving forward, I will be turning my analytical sights on Conversational Systems and Conversational Intelligence. My Goal is to help enterprise executives fine-tune Customer Experiences

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